This week sees the release of two new films from acclaimed non-American directors, both of which bypassed Spokane theaters but are now available as digital rentals. The first is Kontinental ’25, the latest from the prolific Radu Jude, and it’s another of his stinging critiques of contemporary Romania.
Eszter Tompa plays Orsolya, a law professor turned government bailiff. While she’s evicting an older man squatting in the basement of a building, he hangs himself from a radiator. The rest of film deals with Orsolya’s guilt over the man’s suicide: She’s vocally progressive, someone who believes she has the “correct” politics, and yet she continues working for an oppressive system.
Jude’s movies are not subtle; they’re profane and messy, with shoddy digital camerawork and scenes that go on too long. His characters often have didactic political and ideological conversations, and he uses obvious visual juxtaposition to illustrate the absurdity of modern life: Here we have Orsolya reciting the Lord’s Prayer in a park populated by animatronic dinosaur statues, and final shots of dilapidated, century-old homes sitting next to newly constructed condo buildings and businesses.
Kontinental ’25, whose title is a riff on Roberto Rossellini’s Europa ’51, is packed with Jude’s political ideas. It’s about the short-sightedness of nationalism, about class and economic disparities, about the historical tensions between Hungarians and Romanians. This is an often incisive satire, but Jude is threatening to repeat himself: He’s made all these observations before but to much more scabrous, outrageous effect.
German filmmaker Christian Petzold, meanwhile, specializes in subtle, sometimes illusory character studies about identity, duality and complicated relationships that we — and often the people involved in them — don’t totally understand. His newest drama, Miroirs No. 3, gets its title from a musical leitmotif, but the movie itself is like a hall of mirrors.
It features a small cast of Petzold regulars, including Paula Beer as a concert pianist named Laura. She’s in a car accident on a quiet stretch of country road. Her boyfriend dies, and she walks away with barely a scratch. A woman who comes upon the accident, named Betty (Barbara Auer), takes Laura in, and she stays for at least a couple weeks. Laura seems numb to her trauma, either because she’s blocking it out or because she doesn’t actually miss her boyfriend much.
Almost immediately, things don’t feel quite right. Betty wasn’t expecting a guest but has clothes that fit Laura. She occasionally calls Laura by the wrong name. Townspeople walk by the house and stare. Betty’s husband and adult son, who seem to live in their auto shop, are suspicious of this interloper but grow closer to her.
This suggests the psychological torment of an Ingmar Bergman film, but Petzold’s touch is slighter and more softspoken, so much so that the movie ends and you might wonder if you’ve missed something. There’s no underlining, no explaining, no emotional catharsis. That can make it a bit frustrating, as if the story were incomplete. But I can’t deny that it keeps playing around in my head, much like the musical piece that gives the film its title.
Nathan Weinbender is a co-host of Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 and Saturday afternoons at 2 on SPR News.