Romanian hell-raiser Radu Jude won the Golden Bear in Berlin in 2021 with the anarchic Covid-era call to arms Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, in which a teacher is persecuted by her school’s community when a sex video her husband made somehow leaks on to the internet. Now, after his even more explosive Do Not Expect Too Much of the End of the World and a brace of more experimental documentaries screened in the Locarno Film Festival — he is nothing if not prolific — he returns in what counts for him as a contemplative mood.
Kontinental ’25 bundles up his usual firecracker concerns: the rise of cowboy capitalism in Romania, the enduring racism in Eastern Europe, the dissolution of social bonds and what that means for the poor. It also has the highest count of mechanical models in any film since Toy Story, popping up at apparent random, and some rampantly inappropriate inter-generational sex in a park. It is, in other words, very much a Radu Jude film.
But it is a Radu Jude film with a narrative throughline that never diverges into some other time zone, bizarre comedy routines or a dissertation on history to break things up and put us through the tumble-dryer of Jude’s restless imagination. It is Jude, if not on his best behavior, at least the kind of behavior that won’t get him thrown out of a diplomatic reception, in the unlikely event that he wanted to go to one.
At its center is the essential question of what responsibility we owe each other as human beings — or, to put it in a more traditional way, how we deal with sin and guilt. Ortolya (Eszter Tompa) is a municipal bailiff in picturesque Cluj, Transylvania, whose job requires her to work in an uneasy alliance with developers keen to throw up luxury hotels on every corner. They just want to clear the human detritus standing the way of their bulldozers.
Their target is a derelict man who lives off begging, occasional odd jobs and whatever rubbish he can find in the local forest, which the city’s entrepreneurs have filled with working life-size models of dinosaurs. In the opening scene, the old man lurches and cursed his way through this Arcadia, the various models roaring and twiddling their claws as he catches their electronic eyes.
This man was once a provincial marathon champion before turning to drink. Now he lives in a decrepit basement; Ortolya has argued for one extension after another, organized a bed in a shelter and has a moving van at the ready to shift his accumulation of rubbish. Of course, he has ignored the eviction notice. She and the hotel company’s goons give him 20 minutes to pack. When they go back, he is dead, having hanged himself from the radiator with a piece of wire.
Ortolya knows she isn’t legally culpable, but isn’t this her doing? Over the next hours, we watch her tell people what happened and how she feels, sometimes dissolving into tears: her male boss, her husband, her best friend, her mother, a former student from her days as a teacher and, finally, her priest hear the story. They react in different ways, but all want to paper over whatever cracks the incident has exposed, thus exposing something of themselves.
Her friend tries to establish some fellow feeling by relating how she had a homeless man removed from their building because he was smelly. Her Hungarian-speaking mother slips almost instantly into a well-worn tirade against lazy Romanians. Those Romanians are by no slouches when it comes to online abuse, however. “Hungarian-ethnic bailiff pushes Romanian athlete to his death,” says one newspaper headline. Her husband pursues her around the house, gleefully reading the below-the-line comments. “We should kill all the Hungarians, with her shit skank face!” She shrinks away. “We used to laugh at this stuff,” he says resentfully.
Like all Radu Jude’s films, this is both angry and ironic; nobody here, including the people sitting in the street cafes, averting their eyes from the beggars, is innocent. That includes us: as Ortolya tells her story over and over, we want her to somehow get over it, move on with her life, whatever other cliché one might muster from a self-help book. The repetitions of the events, which get shorter but are always couched in the same words, raise all kinds of questions about storytelling: how the story reshapes events, how responses to that story smooth it down, how the story itself is diluted as she keeps retelling it and her listeners seem unable to grasp what it means to her. Her guilt is effectively cancelled, restoring the momentary rupture represented by her disturbing feelings that nothing here is as it should be.
Title: Kontinental ’25
Festival: Berlin (Competition)
Director-screenwriter: Radu Jude
Cast: Eszter Tompa, Gabriel Spahiu, Adonis Tanța, Oana Mardare, Șerban Pavlu
Sales agent: Luxbox
Running time: 1 hr 49 mins
