2023-07-02 21:15:18
by Paolo Mereghetti
At the origin of Cristian Mungiu’s film there is a news story, the arrival of some foreign worker in a small village in Transylvania
At the origin there is a news story: in a small village in Transylvania, the population rebelled against the arrival of some workers from Sri Lanka to occupy those jobs in the bread factory that none of the locals wanted to accept. But what a Ken Loach would have transformed into an uncompromising politician (as he did in his last film presented at Cannes, The Old Oak), becomes with Cristian Mungiu something much more articulated and complex, which delves into the problems of a Romania taken with a modernization full of contradictions but which wants to overcome geographical boundaries to speak to everyone. And that he also has a lot to say to us Italians.
«Wild animals» (this is how the original title was changed, which is MRI, i.e. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, an operation to which the father of the protagonist undergoes and which was a metaphor for an excavation to find a «disease» that hides in depth) tells of Matthias (Marin Grigore) who in a fit of anger – his boss called him back to duty calling him a “gypsy” – leaves Germany where he had been working for two years and is forced to return home to Transylvania.
His wife Ana (Macrina Barladeanu) certainly doesn’t welcome him with open arms because she knows of the relationship he had before leaving with Csilla (Judith State), director of the industrial bakery, and who fears he’ll start again, but also because she doesn’t share the exaggeratedly authoritarian ways with which Matthias would like to force Rudi (Mark Edward Blenyesi), his still child son, to deal with the apparently irrational fear of something threatening him on the way to school. And that perhaps is also at the origin of his silence.
The theme of racism towards non-EU citizens has not yet come to the surface and Mungiu (who signs the screenplay by himself) has already brought out the myth of the male as a fighter («To survive you need to know how to fight. People who have mercy die first. I want you to die last” he teaches Rudi) and the presumed supremacy of man over woman, not so much towards his wife whom he considers as a servant, but towards Csilla, whose independence and freedom he does not want to accept even sexual. Without forgetting the rift between ethnic groups that crosses Transylvania where Romanians and Hungarian minorities coexist not without friction. As can be seen perfectly in the ice hockey match between two towns, one with a Romanian majority and the other Hungarian.
One caveat. Try to see the film in the original version because the subtitles have different colors depending on the language in which it is spoken: white captions for Romanian speakers, light yellow for Hungarian and light pink for other languages.
It is in this context that the grain of immigrant workers explodes. To obtain funds from the European Union, the bread factory has to hire other employees and none of the locals is willing to accept the proposed wages (“better to receive unemployment benefit” they say). Thus Csilla pushes the owner (Orsolya Moldován) to hire three immigrant workers from Sri Lanka, triggering the rash reactions of some villagers: those who fear the arrival of mysterious diseases, those who are concerned that they will introduce polygamy (one of the workers is also a Catholic but is expelled from the church himself) or proliferate like rabbits, who of course already see attacks and massacres…
The situation precipitates and Mungiu tells us about it in the style of the great masters: enveloping long shots that stalk people and a 17-minute scene to tell an assembly where languages overlap and people collide, without the camera moves a millimeter but without the spectator almost noticing it.
And if in the end many questions remain unresolved, including that on the “ghosts” of the wild animals that roam those places, what has won will be a cinema that asks the viewer to get involved and to look within themselves for the answers that they are missing.
July 2, 2023 (change July 2, 2023 | 21:20)
© Time.News
#Wild #animals #work #borders #racism #story #score #time.news