Kontinental '25 review – scattergun satire on a tour of Romania's social ills

The Guardian

19-02-2025

Once again, Romanian film-maker Radu Jude has given us a garrulous, querulous movie of ideas – a scattershot fusillade of scorn. It is satirical, polemical, infuriated at the greedy and reactionary mediocrities in charge in his native land and wobbling on an unstable cusp between hope and despair. Like his previous film Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World (whose lead actor Ilinca Manolache appears briefly in cameo here), Jude takes aim at bad faith and bad taste and takes us on what is almost a kind of architectural tour of Romanian malaise – this time in Cluj – in which he shows us the racism, nationalism, and a pointless obsession in the country's governing classes with real estate and property development as a kind of universal aspiration. The movie closes with an acid montage of seedy public housing juxtaposed with gated private estates. And like the previous film, there is a repeated visual trope of a woman driving in a car, shown in profile, driving, driving, driving, looking for something – anything.
Kontinental '25 is loosely inspired by Roberto Rossellini's Europa '51, in which Ingrid Bergman's character is radicalised by a tragedy in her own life – a poster for this is shown in one scene in which our heroine is getting drunk in a cinema bar. Eszter Tompa plays Orsolya, a former law professor who has apparently lost her job and now humiliatingly works as a bailiff. She is now tasked with evicting a homeless, depressed man holed up in the squalid basement of an apartment building bought by a German property firm who intend to raze it to the ground and replace it with a luxury boutique hotel called the Kontinental (a building much bigger than the original and clearly conceived with minimal interest in the existing architectural forms).
This man, Ion (Gabriel Spahiu) is to be seen at first wandering chaotically through the city in various locations that we will come to recognise when other characters wander through them as well. Overwhelmed with despair at the bailiff's appearance Ion takes his own life and Orsolya is stricken with guilt of a strangely neurotic kind; tearfully asking friends and colleagues if she was morally at fault, clearly expecting and receiving the answer no. She is further aghast to learn that the homeless man was a Romanian former Olympic athlete fallen on hard times and so, as an ethnic Hungarian, she may well be abused in the right-wing press for having driven this tragic patriot to his death. (She has already been abused online for having evicted some student radicals from a squat.)
So Orsolya refuses to go on a booked holiday with her husband and children; they go off without her and she instead goes on a midlife crisis tour of the city, having anguished encounters with everyone she knows, in a series of two-shot dialogue scenes, asking them for … what? Understanding? Absolution? She doesn't quite have the dignity of Ingrid Bergman but an old friend wryly sympathises – noting that incidentally the Romanians stole Cluj and Transylvania from the Austrian-Hungarian empire. Orsolya's elderly mother manages to steer the conversation around to how thoroughly admirable she considers Viktor Orbán's Hungary and when Orsolya indignantly calls Orban a fascist, her mother throws her out, calling her a 'whore'. She then gets drunk with one of her old law students who is working as a food delivery cyclist with a sign on his back saying 'I'm Romanian' because racist drivers will run over the Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans doing this job. After having alfresco sex with him, Orsolya talks earnestly to a priest who assures her that suicide is a terrible sin for the individual themselves and no one else is responsible.
It is a bizarre, clamorous tour of anxiety, disclosing a panorama of indifference, of dyspeptic lack of interest in the idea that other people's suffering (or wellbeing) is of the smallest significance or interest. It's not an easy watch, but Jude's film-making has such energy and punch.
Kontinental '25 screened at the Berlin film festival.