Kontinental '25

 

Writer/director Radu Jude

Jude with Silver Bear from Berlin

KONTINENTAL ’25             B                                                                                        Romania  (109 mi)  2025  d: Radu Jude                              

Premiering at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival, this is a satirical city portrait that evolves into a crisis of conscience film that won a Silver Bear for Best Screenplay.  From the maker of eight feature films in the last ten years, including I Don't Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians (Îmi este indiferent daca în istorie vom intra ca barbari) (2018), Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (Babardeala cu bucluc sau porno balamuc) (2021), Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Nu astepta prea mult de la sfârsitul lumii) (2023), and a second release this year, DRACULA (2025), Jude describes this film as a tribute to Roberto Rossellini’s Europa '51 (1952), where the wealthy protagonist (Ingrid Bergman) is deluged by guilt after her son’s suicide, while the Italian elite has already forgotten the traumas of World War II.  In a distinct homage, a poster for the Rossellini film can be seen hanging in a movie theater bar.  Similarly, court bailiff Orsolya (Eszter Tompa) is besieged by that same guilt after a homeless man she tried to help committed suicide during a contentious eviction, leaving her overwhelmed by feelings of doubt and inadequacy, questioning her own role in such a horrible tragedy.  The film opens playfully in a forest, however, where the first realization that comes to mind is:  Who knew dinosaurs were living in the forests of Romania?  Radu Jude has a little fun adding this comical surrealist element, which comes as a major surprise, as he is a director largely known for his in-your-face social realism, part of a neorealist tradition where poverty is infused into the subject matter.  Stripped down to its bare essentials, the film was shot by his regular cinematographer Marius Panduru in just 10 days during a break in the filming of DRACULA on an iPhone 15, with no lights, no grips, and a miniscule budget, initially proposed to be a Romanian TV movie, as Jude relies entirely on long conversations and sharp situational humor, crafting another brilliant absurdist comedy-drama infused with his signature sardonic wit.  Once again dissecting Romania’s contradictions in its uneasy transition from socialism to capitalism, this is a continuation of a body of work that regularly questions the political and social conditions of contemporary Romania, though this time viewed through the lens of an exploding housing market in parallel with growing inequalities, exacerbating the question of economic injustice, leading to a conflicted middle class caught between past and present, bearing a close proximity to Haneke’s middle-class criticisms.  Part of the second generation of filmmakers comprising New Romanian Cinema, this is a testament to Jude’s ability to create something out of nothing, in this case a socio-political allegory, exploring the moral and spiritual poverty of these bleak times, where the goal is to make social reality visible in its harshness, without embellishment, with all roads leading to existential desolation, where there’s even a scene from Robert Aldrich’s apocalyptic nightmare Kiss Me Deadly (1955), along with a TV screening of Edgar G. Ulmer’s film noir  Detour (1945), another film shot in a week for next to nothing.  Yet another variation on Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, where we, as spectators, are never truly “innocent,” with Jude crafting a fascinating experiment that, while more austere than usual, still carries his razor-sharp commentary and biting satire, where the caustic manner and subversive tone always influence the overall vision.

In the city of Cluj-Napoca in Romania’s Transylvania region, a bailiff named Orsolya accompanies the local police in evicting a cantankerous, constantly swearing homeless man named Ion (Gabriel Spahiu), a collector of recyclables who had been temporarily squatting in an unused boiler room, where the building is scheduled for demolition in an effort to modernize the city (enriching a handful of developers who are described as mobsters), to make way for the construction of a luxury Kontinental boutique hotel.  Apparently she had some dealings with this man before, and while exposing the absurd cruelty of bureaucracy, in this case carrying out the interests of the rich, she graciously gives him some time and space, and a few minutes alone to collect his things, hoping to alleviate any unnecessary pressure, but she is thoroughly aghast to discover that he tragically commits suicide rather than be transported to an emergency shelter, where she ends up plagued by her own complicity in his death.  Ion actually introduces the film, seen amusingly wandering through a dinosaur-infested forest, an actual Dino-Park, a perfect metaphor for post-communist capitalism, before making his way into the city, establishing his presence as a curious character living on the fringe of society, seen dumpster-diving and begging outdoor restaurant customers for money, amusingly harassed by a ridiculously threatening robot police dog, where the plight of the poor contrasts mightily with the picturesque elegance of the city central square surrounded by dramatic European architecture from the beginning of the last century.  Much like Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), the film begins with a victim and then shifts focus to the perpetrator, as Orsolya carries the rest of the picture, spiraling into a moral crisis, seeking solace from her husband, but his mind immediately turns to sex, forcing her to back out of a planned vacation to Greece with her family as her life is thrown into an emotional tailspin.  While hardly a criminal, she finds herself complicit in a mechanism that trivializes inequalities and places her on the side of the wealthy real estate perpetrators.  The film depicts the difficulty of living with or dealing with one’s conscience, where collective guilt is a societal byproduct of actions necessary for moral survival, as the middle class is required to serve the powerful elites without ever benefiting from the prosperity produced.  Told by friends that she did nothing wrong, and that she’s not responsible, yet no one seems able to understand her or relieve her pain, nonetheless she feels guilty, burdened by a guilty conscience, which only grows worse after learning from the media that Ion was once an Olympic athlete, a forgotten national hero.   As an ethnic Hungarian in Romania, she quickly becomes an easy target from far-right nationalist critics, vilified online through social media as the Hungarian woman who drove a patriotic Romanian to his death.  Fusing fiction and documentary, with election posters promising “honor and loyalty in the service of my country,” this is a reflection of the quiet collapse of empathy in modern Europe, and an uncomfortably accurate reflection of our modern-day malaise, and while the filmmaker refuses to be associated exclusively with so-called political cinema, this more accessible effort feels funnier, more uninhibited, freer, and more surprising.

Searching for understanding and moral clarity, Jude’s camera lingers in front of historical monuments, which evoke political lessons, while there’s an oppressive aspect to the almost documentary quality of expansive shots of construction sites, reflective of the rampant property speculation in the middle of a real estate boom, where old ruins and historic buildings are contrasted with new-build luxury developments with gated private residences, as the still-growing city advances into modernity.  Both Orsolya and her friend Dorina (Oana Mardare) appease their guilt by donating to charities, while also discussing the Hungarian-Romanian conflict, where Transylvania has been passed back and forth multiple times since the 19th century, resulting in a backlash of resentment from both sides, where we are told “Romanians stole Cluj and Transylvania from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.”  These are the words of her mother (Annamária Biluska), a self-professed Orbán supporter and proud Hungarian, who dismisses Romania’s so-called economic advancements, believing they remain among the more culturally backward countries in Europe, describing Romanians as “serfs” and “peasants,” as it remains an economic and political system rooted in inequality.  Even the food delivery drivers are nationalistic, with Orsolya running into Fred (Adonis Tanța), one of her former law students with an infectious charm who is now a food delivery cyclist, wearing a backpack that reads “I’m Romanian,” a survival tactic meant to distinguish him from others Indian drivers from Bangladesh and Sri Lanka who are easy targets for city drivers, who do not hesitate to run them over.  A failed academic prone to recounting anecdotes about long-dead Zen Buddhist monks, they spend a wild night drinking, debating, and eventually having drunken sex in a public park.  Meanwhile, the streets abound with slogans, posters, declarations of principle now devoid of all meaning, like the anti-communist altar where Orsolya and Fred idly sit drunk, carrying out discussions on Ukraine and Gaza, where ordinary citizens feel so powerless.  Afterwards she has a long discussion with an orthodox priest (Șerban Pavlu), hoping to clarify the suffocating effects of her lingering guilt, where he also reminds her that this is not her fault, as a reading of the scriptures concludes suicide is a sin against oneself and humanity, and no one bears responsibility but the person who took their own life.  While removed from the Roman Catholic Church list of mortal sins, the Church is now willing to look at the individual circumstances of each self-inflicted death, like what weighed upon the victim’s consciousness that led to such a drastic action, offering prayers and forgiveness, which are also extended to Orsolya.  In this maelstrom of misfortune the hollow words of the priest consulted by Orsolya seem a very meager consolation.  The film seemingly stalls near the end, yet part of what’s confounding is just how repetitious this becomes, with Orsolya spouting endless versions of the suicide episode ad nauseam, confessing her alleged sins at each and every turn, literally obsessed with her own personal failures, even as others repeatedly forgive her.  While she may be legally innocent, she still ends up feeling terrible, plagued by self-doubt, like she didn’t do enough, but what she ultimately discovers is that guilt is a relative concept in contemporary Romania.  Essentially a film about displacement, whether it be political, personal, or moral, Orsolya continues to search for clarity but finds only contradictions, yet ends up exposing the wider indifference of today’s society, where nationalist polemics, racist sayings, and aggressive misogyny serve as the norm.

The Dead

 

Director John Huston

Huston on the set with his son Tony

author James Joyce, 1904

THE DEAD                A                                                                                                            Great Britain  Ireland  USA  (83 mi)  1987  d: John Huston

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window.  It had begun to snow again.  He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight.  The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward.  Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland.  It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.  It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried.  It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns.  His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

—James Joyce The Dead, last short story from Dubliners, originally written in 1904, with this longer story added in 1907, not published until 1914, The Dead by James Joyce

John Huston began his career as a screenwriter, and one of the obvious strengths of his work is his attention to dialogue, relying heavily upon literary adaptations as a director, where the great majority of his 36 features, and certainly his best-known ones, were drawn from novels, short stories, or plays, with Huston awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Literature from Trinity College Dublin.  In his storied career, one need only think of THE MALTESE FALCON (1941), a Dashiell Hammett novel, THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948), an adventure novel by B. Traven, KEY LARGO (1948), based on a Maxwell Anderson play, THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950), a W.R. Burnett novel, THE AFRICAN QUEEN (1951), a C.S. Forester novel, MOBY DICK (1956), a Herman Melville novel, The Misfits, (1961), written by playwright Arthur Miller, THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING (1975), a Rudyard Kipling short story, and WISE BLOOD (1979), a Flannery O’Connor novel, among others, while this last and final film is an adaptation of what is perhaps James Joyce’s most perfect story from Dubliners, a collection of short stories focusing upon a series of characters connected only by the city in which they reside, written when Irish nationalism was at its peak, when a search for a national identity and purpose was paramount, made while he was sitting in a wheelchair while hooked up to an oxygen tank, on the verge of his own death (four months after shooting ended), suffering from terminal emphysema, bringing a vividly personalized atmosphere to the set.  Something of a love letter to Ireland and a merging of kindred artistic spirits, the youthful writer and the aging filmmaker, both coming to terms with their impending mortality, each wondering how they would be remembered and what they would leave behind, borrowing several biographical details from Joyce’s life, as both he and Gabriel Conroy reviewed books for the pro-British Dublin Daily Express, taught in college, became Europeanized, and were largely indifferent to the nationalistic aims of their native country.  Heavily impacted by Joyce ever since his mother smuggled him a copy from Paris during the 1920’s of the then-banned novel Ulysses, writing in his 1980 autobiography An Open Book, “It was probably the greatest experience that any book has ever given me,” actually influencing his decision to move to Ireland in 1952, thoroughly disgusted by the McCarthyist witch hunt spreading through Hollywood at the time, wanting to escape the “moral rot” ruining the lives of many of his friends in the movie industry, eventually becoming an Irish citizen.  Adapted by his son Tony Huston, with an opening dedication “For Maricela,” the director’s longtime nurse and companion Maricela Hernández, this mysteriously complex film also stars his daughter Angelica Huston, who he previously directed in PRIZZI’S HONOR (1985), winning her a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award, where the cast is all-Irish except Angelica Huston, but she grew up in Ireland, having moved there when she was just two years old, and doesn’t miss a beat, with most of the cast coming from Dublin’s Abbey Theatre company, yet what really stands out is the power of the performances.  Angelica Huston has never been so, well - - angelic, for lack of a better word, as she’s usually typecast as a much tougher person, darker and more imposingly complex, an actress whose strong onscreen physicality and elegance is hard to underestimate, yet here she plays Gretta Conroy, the wife of an academic, Gabriel Conroy (Donal McCann), modeled directly after Joyce’s wife, Nora Barnacle (also serving as Joyce’s role model for Molly Bloom in Ulysses), playing a more minor part than her husband, easily overlooked through most of the story.  While she’s outwardly kind and socially considerate, the picture of etiquette and social grace, the story turns on a dime near the end, where out of nowhere she becomes the central focus, almost by accident, as her actions suddenly influence the mood of the entire story, taking a decidedly melancholy trajectory, where all the banalities of ordinary existence and the much anticipated social pretensions, captured in all its drunken comedy and pathos, must be endured in order to appreciate the full emotional power of such a magnificently realized finale, like a beam of light streaming in opening our eyes to what the story is really driving at, suggesting a love for life can also express itself as a complicated love for the dead, becoming a labor of love so unlike Huston’s earlier films, beautifully blending in to the social setting of the turn-of-the-century era. 

Joyce had a complex relationship with Dublin, and Ireland, leaving the city for good after 1909, and after 1912 he never set foot in Ireland again, moving to Italy and then Paris where he was surrounded by like-minded contemporary writers like Marcel Proust, Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and W.B. Yeats, where his reasons were both deeply personal and part of broader societal trends, reflective of what he saw as the spiritual “deadness” of Dublin, while also decrying Irish society’s conservatism, censorship, religious hypocrisy, and zealous nationalism, though his spiritual and artistic engagement with the city continued until the end of his life, while according to Huston, “All I know about filmmaking is in this film.”  Written in 1907 when he was just 25 from an apartment in Trieste, Italy, more than a decade before Ulysses was published in 1922, the film is about memory, loss, and the lasting power of the dead over the living, and while it’s a faithful adaptation, there are additions not included in the original source material, reassigning numerous lines to different characters, while also introducing an entirely new character in Mr. Grace (Seán McClory), who eloquently recites an English translation of an 8th-century Middle Irish poem Donal Óg.  Taking place in Dublin in 1904, a Feast of the Epiphany dinner party, held every year 11 days after Christmas, is hosted by two spinster sisters, Kate and Julia Morkan (Helena Carroll and Cathleen Delany), and their unmarried niece, Mary Jane (Ingrid Craigie), all music teachers, as horse-drawn carriages arrive with formally-dressed guests on the snowy night, where we learn that for years the sisters have functioned as the official center of the city’s cultural world.  While Joyce’s writing provides access to Gabriel’s internal, stream-of-consciousness perspective, including his rapidly shifting observations, memories, and emotional responses, a vantage point that is practically impossible to replicate on the screen, instead Huston fluctuates between newly arriving guests, a joyous occasion seamlessly shifting the perspectives, expressing a range of disagreements among the guests, often confronted with uneasy realities, where it’s easy to get swept away by the accumulative power of the experience, yet it’s also hard not to admire his purely cinematic adaptation for its faithfulness to the time period through lighting, costumes, music, and such eloquent diction, where the acute eye for detail is impressive.  Shot by Fred Murphy, it looks utterly spectacular.  Gabriel is sarcastically teased by the fiery temperament of Molly Ivors (Maria McDermottroe), an Irish nationalist colleague who berates him for writing for The Daily Express, which she refers to as an “English rag,” suggesting he should be ashamed of himself for betraying his Irish identity, calling him a “West Briton,” “someone who looks to England for our salvation instead of depending on ourselves alone,” a reference to the political slogan of Sinn Féin, as she leaves the party early, stomping off to attend a Republican meeting.  Over the course of the festive dinner party, where guests discuss topics of musical and local interest, Mr. Browne (Dan O’Herlihy) arrives with flowers which he likens to the gifts of the Magi (which does not appear in the Joyce story), featuring plenty of music and dancing, with the men hovering around a table in the next room with the drinks, some overzealously, as guests find themselves haunted by spectral figures of an older, near-forgotten Dublin, what Huston’s friend Orson Welles characterized as a “myth of the past.”  Yet Joyce was a literary realist, depicting the sensory texture of thought and feeling, where that consciousness constitutes the essence of human life, yet the past may continually push and prod its way into the present, or may leap into our thoughts at any time, and while the characters may be prone to nostalgia, the story is not.  The festive dancing sequences mirror equally enthralling scenes in a Jane Austen novel, as they are everpresent, with audiences watching the action from behind the camera.  When the dancing subsides, Mary Grace plays a virtuosic showpiece on the piano while Aunt Julie performs a Bellini aria for the guests, though her singing voice has clearly diminished with age, as the camera peers through back rooms filled with memorabilia, a reminder of the ephemeral nature of life, while Mr. Grace reads an extraordinary recitation about a girl whose life is ruined by her passionate love for a man who promised her things he failed to deliver, only to abandon her, as if in the absence of God, Broken Vows [The Dead (John Huston, 1987)] YouTube (3:38).  While Gretta says nothing, the camera lingers on her placid countenance, thinking something only to herself, where it makes you wonder about the poem’s effect on her.     

You have taken the east from me; You have taken the west from me
You have taken what is before me and what is behind me;
You have taken the moon, you have taken the sun from me,
And my fear is great that you have taken God from me! 

Mirroring those internalized, personal reflections, the conversation turns to whatever happened to the many great operatic tenors that once flourished in Dublin, lamenting that so few are like them today, turning to the tableside expert in the matter, Bartell D’Arcy (Frank Patterson), a celebrated tenor with a sizeable reputation.  While the name Caruso is mentioned, Aunt Kate recalls someone from her youth by the name of Parkinson, a name no one else recalls, yet just thinking about him stirs something inside, her eyes glistening in tears, with the camera holding on her face in close-up.  This is the magic of memory, where the long-dead continue to live inside, haunting us in ways that nothing else can.  As the guests begin to leave, politely exchanging pleasantries, Gretta gets halfway down the stairs before she pauses, struck by what she hears, as the tenor D’Arcy is singing The Lass of Aughrim offscreen, an Irish variant of a Scottish ballad, a song that shifts back and forth between two former lovers lamenting the failings in their relationship, accentuating the imperfections and fragility of human love which lead to heartbreak and to untimely death, sending her into a prayer-like trance, framed by a stained-glass window, immaculately dressed like the Virgin Mary, with a white shawl around her neck and shoulders, representing purity in every sense of the word, The Lass of Aughrim - Frank Patterson YouTube (2:22).  A flood of memories wash over her as she listens intently, while her husband can only imagine what’s captured her attention, frozen in the moment, aware of the “grace and mystery in her attitude.”  Literally the turning point of the film, the music and storytelling of the evening awaken such intense memories, yet the couple says nothing on the carriage ride back to their hotel.  Only then, with Gabriel having hopes of getting amorous, does she finally break into tears, recalling a tragic childhood romance with a young man named Michael Furey in Galway, who used to sing that song to her, feeling responsible for his death at the age of 17, as he died under the window of her room.  “He was very delicate,” she says, revealing to her husband that Michael was very sick, but left his sick bed and stood outside her window in the cold and rain to say goodbye before she returned to Dublin, dying a week later, confessing “‘I think he died for me.”  The song opened up the floodgates of the pain that she had long repressed, serving as a catalyst which motivates her to remember something so clearly from her past, and while she clearly loves Gabriel and calls him “a very generous person,” she knows that he has never sacrificially given of himself in the way that Michael did for her, which only serves to reveal the lack of true intimacy and genuine love binding the Conroys, bringing about an emotional distance between them.  The cathartic final scene of the film leaves audiences to ponder the strange hold of the past over the present, as well as the impenetrable differences of those who are closest to us.  As Greta tearfully falls asleep in the hotel room, Gabriel is left looking out the window at the falling snow enveloped in darkness and utter solitude, struck by an all-embracing epiphany, realizing that he’s been deceiving himself for all these years, as he was neither Gretta’s first love nor her greatest love, helplessly discovering that he is less than who he thought he was.  His mind wanders to the future, imagining sitting around Aunt Julia’s deathbed, contemplating how he’ll be remembered, if at all, where his place in the world feels so impermanent.  “Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”  The final lines of voiceover dialogue spoken over orchestral refrains from The Lass of Aughrim encapsulate his severe desolation and loneliness, questioning his entire life again, reflecting on his existential existence and what it means to be alive before turning into shadows in one of the most profoundly stirring passages in all of literature, The Dead (1987) End Monologue YouTube (4:15), a fitting epitaph for Huston, where it’s hard not to be affected by the extreme intensity and literary potency of the language, mirroring Molly Bloom’s infamous stream-of-conscious soliloquy at the end of Ulysses.  A second camera operator, Scottish Michael Coulter, captures the mesmerizingly beautiful snowy landscapes, where the snow is a metaphor for the vast wasteland and hopelessness experienced by Joyce during the time period, looking out into the uncertainty of his country’s future, while Alex North’s elegiac Celtic harp music plays over both the opening and the end credits.

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