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

54/100

Valuable, I suppose, as a reminder that there are still plenty of people, all over the world, who feel no shame whatsoever about being overt xenophobes. Mungiu makes some feints at complexity, introducing us to this rural enclave via one belligerent macho asshole whose racism qualifies as passive (he remains silent when pals start spouting ugly bullshit, but signs the petition demanding that three Sri Lankans leave town) and acknowledging that the bakery's refusal to pay a decent wage precipitated their need to import workers in the first place. The ratio's out of whack, though, and that's never more apparent than in the celebrated town-meeting scene/shot, which is orchestrated more expertly than anything of the sort since Loach's Land and Freedom but devotes some 15 of its 17 uninterrupted minutes to remarks so repugnant ("We have nothing against these people, so long as they stay in their country, not in our bakery sticking their hands in bread we eat. Call me old-fashioned, but it makes me sick") that all one can really do is despair for humanity while feeling superior to virtually everyone onscreen. Were R.M.N. as scrupulously naturalistic as 4 Months etc. or Graduation, its didacticism might not clang as hard; instead, Mungiu's chosen to traffic in blatant symbolism, with one minor character getting an MRI (in Romanian: RMN) that represents the film's own diagnostic exposure of a societal tumor, plus another recurring figurative ploy that culminates in the silliest ending I've seen since Vincent Gallo's original Cannes cut of The Brown Bunny. It was Mungiu's bad luck that I happened to watch this not long after revisiting Dogville, which elevates a similarly schematic dynamic—ostensibly welcoming (courtesy of a single intellectual), surpassingly cruel small town abuses a "dangerous" outsider —by defamiliarizing it through relentless abstraction, with the true subject memorialized in the closing credits. R.M.N. does the exact opposite, realism --> climactic abstraction, and that's not remotely as effective.