199. Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky’s Russian film “Ray” (Paradise) (2016) (Russia): A very well-made and intelligent Holocaust film built on an outstanding original screenplay

“ A real director is not a director that makes films but who understands people. Or, in any case, tries to understand them because understanding people is, of course, impossible”–Andrei Konchalovsky (quote from his official website)

When Andrei Konchalovsky is in his elements, he can be amazing.  His latest work Paradise is one of his best works, carefully crafted and entertaining for attentive and astute viewers, a film in which difficult questions beyond the obvious horrors of the Holocaust are placed and answered by characters that we can possibly associate in our contemporary daily life.

Konchalovsky is not a filmmaker to be ignored or scoffed at—he studied cinema with Andrei Tarkovsky. The two classmates went on to be co-scriptwriters of Tarkovsky’s first three films The Steamroller and The Violin (1961), Ivan’s Childhood (1962) and Andrei Rublyev (1966).  Tarkovsky made a film The First Day (1979), totally based on Konchalovsky’s script, which ran into problems with political censors of the day and was hidden (and now believed to be lost) but not actually destroyed as Tarkovsky publicly claimed. A well-known admirer of Akira Kurosawa, Konchalovsky got the nod of the Japanese maestro to make the film based on Kurosawa’s original script of Runaway Train, after Kurosawa gave up on the idea to make a film out of it. Konchalovsky’s Runaway Train (1985) was made in USA in English language with major Hollywood actors—a profound film that most viewers dismissed as a mere prison escape film. If one studies Paradise and compares it with Runaway Train, there are interesting parallels between the two films. More on that, later, in this review. According to IMDB, Paradise was also partially shot in USA.

Interrogation of Olga by Jules, interrupted by a tortured
resistance fighter being dragged to another room for further questioning

What is Paradise all about? Many films have been made on the horrors of the Holocaust that show the brutality and lack of pity for the prisoners by the German Nazi militia. Very few works of cinema have looked at the situation from the point of view of the Germans [a glorious exception being Hans Jurgen Syberberg’s Hitler--a film from Germany(1977)] and other nationalities involved closely with the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps. Paradise is less about the Jews that perished and more about the mindset and self-evaluation of three distinct fictional personalities carved out of the Russians, the Germans and the French communities by co-scriptwriters Elena Kiseleva and Andrei Konchalovsky on their second feature film together.  Their first collaboration The Postman’s White Nights (2014) and their second Paradise went on to win the Best Director awards at the Venice film festival in 2014 and again in 2016. Their craft was also recognized by the Mar del Plata international film festival by honouring it with the Best Screenplay award.  The magic these two individuals are able to weave are reminiscent of the Kieslowski and Piesiewicz collaboration in the evening of the famous Polish director’s career.

Kiselava and Konchalovsky, being Russians, built the tale around Olga, a Russian émigré in Paris, an aristocrat, and an editor of the Vogue fashion magazine. The Nazi Germany had occupied Paris and Olga is close to the French resistance and hides two Jewish kids only to be arrested for the good deed. The co-scriptwriters then create Jules, a French upper middle class “collaborator,” a senior police official, who serves the Nazis by identifying the members of the French resistance using torture and sending off Jews to concentration camps while leading a comfortable life with his wife and son. Finally,  the scriptwriter duo sculpt a well-read, well-appointed  German aristocrat named Helmut, who admires the Russian works of Chekov and who had once contemplated doing a thesis on the Russian writer, and yet surprisingly believes in Aryan superiority concepts of Hitler and Himmler.

The comfortable family world of Jules in Paris

The amazing script also sculpts the contradictions in the three well-to-do characters.  The attractive Olga (Yulia Vysotskaya, wife of director Konchalovsky), who is not a Jewess, offers sex to Jules, her interrogator to avoid torture and free her friends in the Resistance. Jules (Phillipe Duquesne) who has no compunction in torturing his own countrymen lives with his wife and son as respectable Parisian family man. Helmut, (Christian Clauss/Kristian Klauss) who believes in the extermination of Jews, saves many from being sent to the concentration camps if they were only a quarter Jew by their family tree and would shoot German officers to death if found to be corrupt. The lives and death of the fascinating trio intersect as the film progresses. Olga could have escaped and lived with a man, who she once knew as a benign cultured person and unfortunately had transformed into an evil man. She chooses not to escape death by helping another live in her place.

Helmut (back to the camera) is recruited by Himmler (looking out of the window)
because of Helmut's perfect Aryan credentials, with Hitler's bust
between them--a shot reminiscent of  Syberberg's film
Hitler--a film from Germany (1977) 

Add to the interesting trio of characters developed by the scriptwriters, an interrogation of the trio, each separately done, as if they themselves are inmates of the concentration camps wearing prisoner outfits by an interrogator you never see.  Yes, Olga was an inmate. But the other two were not inmates but safe outsiders. These interrogations are intelligently spliced within the films main narrative. Jules is shown making statements to his interrogator after the film shows he is killed. Only the interesting end scene put all what has preceded in the film in full perspective.  That is when you realize how different and creative the script and direction of Paradise is compared to other popular Holocaust films such as Schindler’s List and Son of Saul. The master stroke of Paradise is that the interrogator is only heard on screen, never discussed beyond that for obvious reasons.

Olga in the concentration camp fighting for a personal bar of soap

...and Olga (extreme right) enjoying her soup after recovering
 the shoes of a dead inmate to cover her bare feet

Olga and Helmut--reality and cinema--enjoying a brief interlude
of comfort and love

Konchalovsky and Kiseleva provide two parallel ways for the viewer to evaluate the film. One is the obvious actions of the trio and the resulting feelings for the viewer. The second is the self assessment of the trio of their actions. The self appraisal transcends the obvious actions and therefore provides the viewer an opportunity to contemplate the power of good cinema over the conventional film narrative. In a larger context, the film assesses the role of three nations in the world war and the complex attitudes of individuals to the Holocaust.

Konchalovsky, either intentionally or unintentionally, has developed the tale of Paradise on the basic structure of his earlier Runaway Train. In Runaway Train, there were two male escapees (Manny/Jon Voight and Buck/Eric Roberts) and one unwitting female passenger (Sara/de Mornay). The first two were convicts, while the innocent third was on the train by happenstance. In Paradise, two men and a woman are being interrogated.  The two men have committed war crimes of different hues, while the woman is essentially a good individual who helped two Jewish children hide from the Nazis initially and helps two Jewish children and their mother at the end of the film. In Runaway Train, the relentless warden does not dispense justice but gets his moral due. In Paradise, the mysterious interrogator dispenses justice.

The title Paradise is very interesting as nothing in the film except for the finale has any relevance to the word. What happens in the film is far from any concept of paradise. Is it the idyllic Aryan dream that Helmut believed in that title refers to? Only the last few minutes of the film reveal Konchalovsky’s key to understanding the film and its purpose to the full extent. Konchalovsky, like Tarkovsky, is deeply religious and influenced by the Russian Orthodox Church. There is no overt religious symbol in the entire film and yet it is a religious film. The end of the film gives the truer meaning of the title. That is the capability of Konchalovsky who made Jon Voight’s final posture in Runaway Train atop the hurtling train engine unmistakably religious without a word spoken in the film that was religious. You learn a lot when you have to bypass censors in Stalinist Russia that Tarkovsky and Konchalovsky endured.

There is another common strand between Tarkovsky and Konchalovsky.  Both were born into aristocratic families that gave importance to literature. Tarkovsky’s father was a poet. Konchalovsky’s family (the Mikhlakovs) can be traced back to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Andrei Konchalovsky is the half bother of another important Russian filmmaker, Nikita Mikhalkov.

Perhaps this element of aristocracy has something to do with Konchalovsky’s interest in Chekov and Turgenev, rather than Dostoevesky or Tolstoy. Two of Konchalovsky’s previous films are adaptations of the former pair—Uncle Vanyaand The Nest of the Gentry. Helmut’s character in Paradise, who loves Russian literature, refers more than once to Chekov rather than Dostoevesky or Tolstoy.

One would be intrigued by the choice of black and white and the Academy format aspect ratio of 11:8 used in Paradise. These concepts, the static camera placement during interviews and the recurring suggestion of film rolls running out has been obviously introduced to give the feeling of an interrogation where those interviewed have to tell the truth often from their own volition. All that makes sense, if the viewer is patient right up to the end and all what had preceded up to that point falls into place.  And what an ending!

Olga and the two Jewish kids in the concentration camps--
a throwback to the two kids
she tried to save earlier that got her into her current plight

Paradise is definitely one of the most intelligent films made in 2016 with a remarkable screenplay and three lead actors chosen carefully from three countries: Russia, Germany and France, to provide veracity few directors care to indulge in these days.

P.S. Paradise is one of the author’s top 10 films of 2016. Konchalovsky’s Runaway Train (1985) was reviewed earlier on this blog and is one of the author’s top 100 films. This film, for those interested in Christian theology, provides an interesting insight on the Russian Orthodox Church's view on the concept of purgatory. In that context, note the hair growth on the recently shaven head of the lead actress--a detail that says a lot about the filmmakers. Mr Konchalovsky is also one of the author's 15 favourite active filmmakers

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195. Colombian director Ciro Guerra’s “El abrazo de la serpiente” (Embrace of the Serpent) (2015) (Colombia/Argentina/Venezuela): An amazing film with deep insights on nature and civilization dedicated to “peoples whose song we will never know.”

Both posters above are predominantly in black and white,
while colour is utilized sparingly and effectively,
 as in the film

“The display I witnessed in those enchanted hours was such that I find it impossible to describe in a language that allows others to understand its beauty and splendour; all I know is that, like all those who have shed the thick veil that blinded them, when I came back to my senses, I had become another man.” ---German scientist and explorer Theodor Koch-Grunberg’s (1872-1924) writings, quoted at the opening of the film

The year 2015 witnessed the release of three outstanding films from South American countries: Land and Shade from Colombia, The Pearl Button from Chile, and Embrace of the Serpent a co-production from Colombia, Argentina and Venezuela. Each of the three films deals with history and economics. Each film present a combination of fact and fiction, the last two blending history with actors playing fictional roles that have some facts to rely on. Each of the films provide the viewer an unsettling perspective of reality that you rarely encounter in cinema these days. Each of these three is an artistic work that will satisfy a sensitive viewer who is looking for entertainment without sex, violence, and escapist action. All three films are bolstered by outstanding cinematography, direction, and incredibly mature performances by little known actors that can make big Hollywood names pale in comparison. And more importantly, these films have been made for a fraction of the cost of an average Hollywood film.

First journey: Koch-Grunberg (Bijvoet), Manduca, and young Karamakate,
with material possessions, including a phonograph

Embrace of the Serpent is a tale of two scientists/explorers: the German Theodor Koch-Grunberg (1872-1924) (played by Jan Bijvoet of Borgman) and the American Richard Evan Schultes (1915-2001) (played by Brionne Davis of Avenged). Both men were seeking a medicinal flower “yakruna” from a native shaman Karamakate (played by Nibio Torres, when young, and Antonio Bolivar, when old), who lives on the banks of the Amazon and its tributaries. 

There is a 20-30 year gap (1909 to 1940) between the two encounters of Karamakate and the two explorers from the developed world. Koch-Grunberg was an ethnographer who had fallen ill while studying the Pemon natives of Venezuela and is brought to the shaman Karamakate, who knows about yakruna and where it can be found. This flower Koch-Grunberg had been told could cure the sick explorer. Karamakate distrusts Koch-Grunberg and Manduca, Koch-Grunberg’s native companion and recently freed slave. Karamakate refuses money as he takes the German and Manduca to Colombia along the Amazon only to find Colombian soldiers misusing the plant as an hallucinatory drug and growing it in untraditional ways for profit and drug abuse. The drugged soldiers and the plants are destroyed by the enraged young Karamakate. Koch-Grunberg is thus not cured and dies even though he is sustained for a while by Karamakate blowing a hallucinogenic powder up his nostril. However, Koch-Grunberg’s detailed notes of his trip with young Karamakate and the yakruna that he saw before the plants were destroyed, survive his passing. 

Second journey: American Richrd Evan Schultes (Davis) and the older
Karamakate (Bolivar), reach where the last yakruna grows

Decades later, the American scientist Richard Evan Schultes, having read the detailed notes of Koch-Grunberg, locates Karamakate, now much older and possibly with memory fading (or at least affecting to fade) and less temperamental than in his youth. The American is also searching for yakruna for commercial reasons because the genetic resource of the flower’s seeds can apparently make rubber trees disease-free adding to the profits of the global rubber industry chain, from forests to factory. Old crafty Karmakate shows him the last yakruna flower and cleverly cooks it for Schultes. The outcome shown in Embrace of the Serpent is, to say the least, fascinating. 

What is the serpent in the title of the film? It is the Amazon. The Amazon does look like an anaconda when viewed from the sky. It appears as a massive snake that populates the Amazon banks and the director cleverly shows the birth of young anacondas early in the film. To add to the visual suggestion, there is a clever line in the script that states the natives believe the snake came from the skies. (This is not far removed from similar analogies within the traditional beliefs of natives of Chile in The Pearl Button.) 

Two aspects of this important film stand out for any viewer. The two native actors who play Karamakate overshadow the performances of professional western actors in this film. The credit not only goes to the native actors but to the script of director and co-scriptwriter Ciro Guerra, co-scriptwriter Jacques Toulemonde Vidal and the cinematographer David Gallego. One has to admit considerable fiction has been enmeshed with the two historical trips on the Amazon river separated in time by some three decades. 

The young impetuous Karamakate (Torres) with the Amazon behind him

The second aspect of the film is the deliberate choice of the director Ciro Guerra to make Embrace of the Serpent in black and white (cinematographer David Gallego) for most parts. [This deliberate choice needs to be compared with a few other important films on evil/distrust and reconciliation deliberately made in black and white with superb outcomes: Mike Nichol’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995) and Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (2009)—all cinematic works with reflective depth and common concerns which would have had lesser impact were they made in lush colour.] It is possible that a colour version of the film Embrace of the Serpent would have emphasized the wrong elements of the tale—the formidable river and the overarching rain forests. The pivotal aspect of the film is the traditional world of the natives and their knowledge of traditional medicine orally handed over generations and kept protected from commercial misuse. When colour is used briefly by the filmmakers in Embrace of the Serpent, it is to communicate this wisdom. It is not surprising that several reviewers have noticed the parallels between Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Embrace of the Serpent. Science/scientific knowledge (here, specifically the commercial production of rare plants and genetic resources) and accumulated human wisdom are weighed against each other in both the cinematic works. Somewhere in the film Karamakate says, “Every tree, every flower brings wisdom.” The endings of both films, their release separated by half a century, will humble a reflective viewer. 

Embrace of the Serpent provides much food for thought. The journeys on the river have parallels with Homer’s tale of Ulysses voyage. In Ciro Guerra’s film, there are three major ports/stops during the river voyage. The first is a native village on the banks of the river. There is a peaceful exchange of knowledge and understanding of each other’s cultures. The natives listen to European classical music from a phonograph of Koch-Grunberg. Koch-Grunberg and Manduca dance to German music of Haydn and Handel and entertain the natives who end up stealing his compass. Koch-Grunberg is upset that his only scientific aid for navigation is lost. Karamakate sagaciously drills reason into the mind of the upset German, ironically reminding the scientist “Knowledge belongs to all. You do not understand that. You are just a white man.” Even the natives need to learn from the developed nations, the shaman appears to assert. Ironically, we learn in the film that shamans such as Karamakate were almost wiped out by the colonizers. One reason for Karamakate to agree taking Schultes on the second voyage on the river is to connect with those remnants of his tribe that had shamans. 

At the religious settlement, the trio treads with care 

The second stop is at a religious settlement run by fanatic Roman Catholic monks who brutally inculcate Christianity in the minds of innocent native kids obliterating any respect they had for traditional wisdom. The monks seem totally oblivious of the virtue of translating Christ’s pacifist teachings in real life. Karamakate, Koch-Grunberg and Manduca try to help free the native kids from the priests' influence. The freed native kids are ironically later found some 30 years later by Karamakate and Schulte as grown-up twisted Christians who have interpreted religion in a bizarre manner, taking to idolatry and cannibalism. The effect of Roman Catholic monks on the natives during the colonization period is dealt in a parallel manner in both Embrace of the Serpent and The Pearl Button. 

The final decision for the old Karamkate comes from his environment
and wisdom that he has acquired over time

The third stop in both voyages is where the yakruna flower grows. Karamakate’s reactions are different each time. It is important to note that yakruna is a plant that can heal, symbolic of the independence of the natives. And it grows on rubber trees! But commercial compulsions of the developed world always lead to loss of independence of the natives. A rubber slave pleads for death as the rubber sap pail he had nailed to a rubber tree has been emptied and he will have to face brutal consequences from his masters. It is therefore not surprising that Karamakate’s constant refrain to both explorers is to unburden themselves of their material possessions.

Embrace of the Serpent constantly pits personal material possessions against collective traditional memories. The old Karamakate says, “To become warriors, the cohiuanos must abandon all and go alone to the jungle, guided only by their dreams. In this journey, he has to find out, in solitude and silence, who he really is. He must become a wanderer and dream. Many are lost, and some never return. But those who return they are ready to face what is to come.“ The film is unusual in many respects. In the film nine languages are spoken including Spanish, Portuguese, German, Catalan, Latin and four aboriginal Amazonian languages. 

Secondly, women are almost peripheral in the film for reasons best known to the filmmkers alone.

Then, the film touches on the resources of the river itself—the fish. Karamakate specifically warns the scientist Koch-Grunberg not to fish during a particular period (possibly its breeding period to preserve its numbers) but the German does not listen and answers, “The river is full of fishes. We cannot possibly end them.” Today, oceans and rivers are rapidly losing the rich fish species and their diversity by mindless over-fishing.

Finally, there is the contrast of the messages in dreams presented in Embrace of the Serpent —the anaconda suggests that Karamakate kill the scientist Theo, the jaguar suggest the opposite. The two dreams distil the quandary of the film for the viewer—science vs human wisdom. The final action of old Karamakate before he disappears seems to reconcile the jaguar’s view and the shaman’s accumulated wisdom. The American explorer Schultes is cured of his insomnia, he can dream, and is now a changed human being. In a parallel Kubrick moment, he is at home with butterflies!

P.S. Embrace of the Serpent won the Golden Peacock at the 2015 Indian International Film Festival in Goa; the Art cinema award at the Cannes film festival; the Golden Apricot at the Yerevan film festival (Armenia); the Golden Astor at the Mar del Plata international film festival; and the Alfred P. Sloan prize at the Sundance film festival. The film is in myriad ways superior to the Hungarian film Son of Saul, which won the Best Foreign Film Oscar while Embrace of the Serpent lost to the Hungarian challenge after both were final nominees for the award. All three films Land and Shade (Colombia), The Pearl Button (Chile), and Embrace of the Serpent (all released in 2015) are on the author’s top 10 films list for that year and have been separately reviewed in detail on this blog. Another film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) mentioned in the above review is also reviewed in detail earlier on this blog.

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139. Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s “Dupa dealuri" (Beyond the Hills) (2012): Beyond the obvious

Romanian cinema produces fascinating movies from time to time. Beyond the Hills is one of them.  There are several reasons why this film is remarkable.

First, it is amazing to have a film with two women, who have never acted in a movie before, to face the cameras and do a job that is so convincing on screen that they both walk away with the prestigious Best Actress Award at Cannes Film Festival, 2012. So what, a cynic could exclaim.  The fact remains that the two ladies won the award when they were competing  against a rather outstanding performance of Ms Emanuelle Riva in Amour (Love), a rare performance that even the American Oscars felt worthy of nominating for the Best Actress Oscar, even though Ms Riva was performing in a movie in a foreign language.

The postures tell a tale of award-winning performances

The two Romanian actresses in Beyond the Hills are Cosmina Stratan (playing an angelic nun named Voichita) and Cristina Flutur (playing a not-so-religious and emotionally unstable Alina). These two can glue the viewer to the screen for the entire duration of the movie but the credit for their outstanding performances truly goes to their director Cristian Mungiu.  In an interview for New York Times, Mungui stated “We rehearsed a lot during casting, read a lot, and I acted a lot for them, so I am giving them directly the tone of voice, the energy, the rhythm, the body language that I want. Guidance, but not with words. I’m not telling them what to do, I show them how to do. But it’s fair to say that by the end, I had adapted as much to them as they adapted to me. We did what was there in the script, but each time it wasn’t possible to get the dialogue exactly right, I was adapting what I wanted to do and editing the scene to what they could do. Because you can’t push onto the actors something that does not belong to them.”  This is what this critic believes contrasts the performance of Ms Riva in Amour versus the Romanian actresses in Beyond the Hills, the difference between the effort of an amateur and a professional. And yet the amateur can perform well under the right mentor—in this case, the director Mungiu.

Second, Beyond the Hills is important cinema not just because of the acting of the two budding actresses who grabbed the Cannes center stage for their undeniable achievement in acting but because of the unmistakable strength of Mungiu’s screenplay in the film (which incidentally won the Best Screenplay Award at the Cannes festival for the director).  The story of the film ostensibly is based on a true life incident in Romania picked up by a journalist Tatiana Niculescu Bran and later turned into a “non-fiction” novel by Bran. Now Bran apparently brought to light a bizarre set of real incidents in a small Christian Orthodox monastery where a girl dies following an “exorcism” done by a group of not-so-educated nuns and a priest. Mungiu’s amazing screenplay takes Bran’s journalism and a subsequent novel to a different plane beyond the incidents. The film asks the viewer the most discomforting and an important unspoken question “Who is responsible?” which is underscored by the final shot of the film of the windscreen wiper following a seemingly innocent conversation between two policemen in a closed vehicle.

Questioning the status quo

The simplistic answer to the “who is responsible” question for many viewers would be the nuns and the priest, belonging to the Orthodox Church living in Moldavia in the twentieth century post-Communist Romania who carried out the exorcism in their blind belief that what they were doing was right, just as the Catholic Church committed atrocities during the days of the Spanish Inquisition in the fifteenth century in Iberia. Yet Mungiu’s script is actually neutral towards the Church. It does not condemn the pious but it condemns a host of ills within the Romanian social fabric. It condemns isolation from development in various spheres, including the world of medical care and the rehabilitation of orphans, religious and atheist and the general lack of education of the denizens of the monastery. 

Beyond the Hills encourages the viewer to ask questions on blind acceptance of priests (of all religions by the extension of this particular vivid example) and their interpretation of religion, the dangers of well-meaning people wanting all to fall in with a particular priest’s line of thought, which actually is a reflection of the Communist mindset that the Romanian people endured for decades.  The director Cristian Mungiu in an interview to Indiewire with journalist Christopher Bell said: “I always try to get inspired by life itself and by things I see happening close to me. The film deals with two different ways of understanding love, about abuse, and about what people are asked to do in the name of love. And hopefully it speaks about this desire we all have whenever we make decisions – we hope we make them with our own heads and not in the name of any kind of ideology which can be extreme. It's one thing where you give people the freedom to decide, but to keep them in the state of mind where they think they don't have information, they don't get education. They are free but don't have the means to make the proper decisions. I don't think communism stopped in 1989, it stopped then as a political system but the consequences will be around for a long while."

Third, the script of Beyond the Hills will bring to the mind of an avid film viewer another film made 10 years ago—the Irish director Peter Mullan’s film The Magdalene Sisters (2002), which won the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival that year. Now both Mullan’s film and Mungiu’s film have common threads. Mullan made the Irish film based on his own script just as Mungiu’s work. Mullen’s film ostensibly relates to the Roman Catholic Church, while Mungiu’s movie deals with a monastery run by an Orthodox Christian priest, facing problems with his own Church leaders.  Both films hark back to real life incidents. Mullan’s film was made because Mullen felt victims of Magdalene Asylums had no closure and had had not received any recognition, compensation, or apology, though the victims remained lifelong devout Catholics.

Happiness with the status quo

The moot point both films raise is beyond religion. Even though the events and setting of the stories are definitely religious, both directors point fingers at the society that blindly follow religion. In The Magdalene Sisters, any Catholic girl who is raped and becomes pregnant out of marriage is considered "unacceptable" by society and the girls' parents force them to become nuns (the Magdalene sisters) that offer only a world of strict discipline without any exposure to the outside world. In Beyond the Hills, the acceptance of becoming a nun is assumed to be less forced by society and more of an individual choice—though the choice is an outcome of lack of education that there are options to lead a life other than that of a nunnery. In Beyond the Hills, the two orphan women who take the center stage of the movie, brought up together, seem to have had options. One chose to be a devout nun: another to live with a foster family outside the religious confines.

While the film Beyond the Hills seems to be focused on the events that take place within the monastery, Mungiu’s screenplay explores the mindsets of two sets of doctors/medical fraternity in Romania today, one before the death of the girl and one after the death.  Mungiu's screenplay deals with how an unfortunate orphan is dealt by doctors and by a family who seek to make money out of civil laws that financially help such foster families. The evocative but silent reaction of the dead girl’s brother when informed of his sister’s death is one of the striking scenes of the movie. Mungiu’s interesting screenplay finally settles down to the reaction of the policemen towards the end of the movie. The end of the film might appear to be abrupt, but the windscreen wiper’s inanimate action clearing the dirt splashed on the windshield is a lovely figurative comment on the film’s preceding tale and the shocking conversation between the two policemen about another recent killing in Romania that had nothing to do with religion or religious people.

Finally, the movie is essentially a tale of an individual against a larger group, where the individual loses out. Here, the individual is relatively more educated because she has been exposed to certain options to choose from, whether acceptable or unacceptable to the viewers, and this individual faces a well-intentioned but uneducated group cloistered in old ways, cut off from the world outside. In yet another interesting perspective, the film offers a love triangle involving two orphan girls and God, where predictably the loser is one of the girls. Beyond the Hills, just as the title of the film suggests, lets the viewer look at options beyond the impediments that obstructs one’s vision. Mungiu is not questioning God, he is questioning social controls, just as Mullen seeks an apology from the Church and society for lifelong devout Catholics who had to spend years of suffering just because they were raped and hence not acceptable to Irish society. But Mungiu’s cinema offers a fascinating and seemingly “abrupt” end to a rather long film without external music. And it is the unusual final sequences, which actually contribute to the movie's inherent strength. 

The recent Romanian films Beyond the Hills and Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr Lazarescu (2005) are entertaining examples of social criticism that combines well with superb acting performances and intelligent screenplays.

P.S. Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr Lazarescu was reviewed on this blog earlier. Beyond the Hills is one of the top 10 films of 2012 for the author.

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