Malmkrog (2020, Cristi Puiu) (Patreon)

28/100

"It seems to me that our discussion has made no progress," observes Olga, accurately, after half an hour of turgid philosophical arguments with four fellow turn-of-the-20th-century aristocrats. "I am not going to engage you in a duel of words," she tells someone later, as if verbal jousting isn't almost literally the only thing that happens over the course of Malmkrog's three hours and 19 minutes. No degree of formal mastery could likely have made this logorrheic exercise palatable to me; it's like sitting through the most elegant freshman-dorm debate in history, listening to labored disquisitions on such previously unexplored questions as "If God is good, why does evil exist?" and "Does anything we do really matter if we're all destined to die?" Chapter III sees Edouard spend just shy of 30 minutes spouting white supremacy (filtered, as it so often is, through the ostensibly less repugnant lens of praising European "civilization"); he's much more eloquent than Tucker Carlson, to be sure, but it's still fundamentally the same experience as watching Fox News. Maybe that's the point: a reminder that these toxic views have been around forever. But (a) who really needs such a reminder? and (b) most of the discourse doesn't encourage that sort of facile tsk-tsking (for which I'd credit Puiu were all of the endless monologues not so deadly dull). Olga and Nikolai's religious skirmishes, in particular, proved difficult for me to parse—partly because references to Olga's Gnosticism flew over my head (had no idea that there were—are?—Christians who don't believe in Jesus' literal resurrection), but mostly because Nikolai's apparent emotional sadism kept being undermined by my fundamental agreement with everything he says. ("What if the real winners are the microbes of physical decay?") In any case, the movie feels at all times like a bone-dry lecture, with ostensibly extemporaneous conversation sounding much the same as do lengthy passages that characters read aloud from a personal letter (in one instance) or from the Bible (in another). 

Granted, it's not impossible to make compelling cinema from characters trading philosophical theses. Puiu ain't Rohmer, though, and Malmkrog decidedly does not give a shit about being "accessible." I'll readily confess to not entirely grasping some key aspects. Don't really understand why Part II—far and away my favorite, if only because it frequently reduces the blathering to background noise—foregrounds head servant István, except insofar as that may appear vaguely, shallowly "responsible" (by way of acknowledging the power dynamic; the film reverts to elitist form immediately thereafter, though, retroactively making this brief focus-pull seem more interlude than rupture). Am frankly bewildered by the conclusion of part III—so much so, in fact, that I'm unsure whether the film's chapters unfold in chronological order. (If they do, surrealism is the only possibility. But to what end?) Hell, I can't even claim to have a firm sense of who these people are—Edouard refers to himself as Franco-Russian, and they all speak French 95% of the time (with a smattering of German, Russian, and English), but Malmkrog is the German name for a Romanian village that was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, so wtf imo. Not that cogent answers to these questions would likely make a significant difference—if my eyes glaze over for three solid hours, wholesale reassessment is a long shot, to put it mildly—but feeling as if Puiu might be tossing random ambiguities into the mix as a sort of art-film seasoning certainly didn't improve my mood any.

Maybe I'd have enjoyed it more without subtitles. Puiu's choreography (there's no other word) constantly reframes the action over the course of complex shots that last 10-15 minutes (and feel much longer, thanks to unobtrusive cuts pivoting on someone who stops to gaze out of a window; I found some of these only by seeking them out afterward). For those who can groove on that sort of thing for its own sake—who revel in shifting bodies and angles without feeling obligated to process the corresponding torrent of verbiage in real time—Malmkrog may well be a delight. Alas, all sensory input demands equal time in my own addled brain, and overload is real. Would I still thrill to Chantal Akerman's metronomic precision if Jeanne Dielman recited the entire text of Being and Nothingness from memory while doing her chores? Probably not. Anyway, nothing but respect for those who dig watching these folks walk the walk as they talk the talk, and my own longstanding resistance to Puiu (bailed on Lazarescu at its Cannes premiere, still kinda hated it when I later rewatched the whole thing, have pretty much suffered through everything else) means that his fans can safely ignore me. All the same, I suspect this is gonna be more Aurora than Sieranevada for those cinephiles lacking a pronounced masochistic streak.