R.M.N. (Cristian Mungiu, 2022)

The title R.M.N. refers to an M.R.I., whose initials in Romanian are R.M.N. But of course, R.M.N. also seems to signify "Romania," and in a way Mungiu's film attempts to be a sort of cinematic brain scan of his homeland, one that reveals a backwards, hateful culture where xenophobia is a given, and the only real question is whether it'll be casual or openly aggressive.

If this sounds incredibly schematic, that's because it is. Mungiu's direction is elegant and precise, with R.M.N. making particularly evocative use of the snow-covered hills and forests of Transylvania. (The film takes place near the Romania-Hungary border, which itself provides a certain level of distrust.) But as an intellectual exercise, the film is a two-hour finger wag at small-town parochialism. Matthias (Marin Grigore) has been working in Germany but loses his job when a foreman calls him a "gypsy" and he head-butts the guy. This is only the first of numerous conflicts that stem from communities reacting to economic insecurity by blaming the closest nearby immigrant. Matthias' sort-of girlfriend Csilla (Judith State) is the manager of a local bread factory and, when no locals want to work for the piddly pay they're offering, she brings three workers from Sri Lanka who soon become the focal point of vicious Romanian MAGAism.

It's hard not to feel some sympathy for Mungiu, given how absolutely he has committed to condemning the closed-mindedness he is witnessing in his homeland. However, R.M.N. is so didactic that it leaves almost no room for Mungiu to exercise his ample skills as a filmmaker. The accelerating dread of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, the psychological extremities of Beyond the Hills, and the mournful resignation of Graduation, are all absent here in favor of an ensemble piece that checks all the right boxes (racism, sexism, neoliberal exploitation) but has very little to say about any of it.

In various reviews, I've seen folks referring to a scene at a town meeting as the film's "centerpiece," probably because it's a scene of about ten minutes that was captured in a single shot. But Mungiu uses this assembly just to allows his characters to give vent to the sort of idiotic public discourse you could find on any internet chatboard. "We have nothing against them, they just don't belong here." "I don't want them touching my bread." "They have different diseases in Asia, and different immunities." "This is Romania. We don't want to become like France." You get the idea.

To put it as simply as I can. R.M.N. is Mungiu's Code Unknown. But where Haneke employed a meticulous macro-structure to display the often unseen connections between people and communities in a given scenario, Mungiu just offers the easiest possible scenario, with backwoods villagers acting backwards so we can join him in tsk-tsking their indefensible behavior. There are other subplots here and there, mostly pertaining to Matthias: the death of his father (Andrei Finti), his troubled relationship with his estranged wife (Macrina Bârlădeanu), and his sensitive young son Rudi (Mark Edward Bienyesi) who, in the film's opening scene, witnesses something in the woods so horrific that he is rendered mute.

All of this is fairly transparent, in the sense that it demonstrates that the village is a place roiling with modern anxieties, but is deeply invested in seeing itself as an oasis of purity in world sullied by the globalism of the EU. (A young Frenchman, who has been sent by an NGO to conduct a count of the local bear population, is a  frequent figure for ridicule.) The locals despise the Sri Lankans, instead of their feckless mayor, simpering priest, or the factory bosses, because it's more satisfying to punch down. And, with five minutes left in the film, it's as though Mungiu suddenly recognized that R.M.N. was stultifying and artless, and so he provides an "ending" that it both visually and narratively incomprehensible.