Prize aggregator at each of his stages in Cannes, Cristian Mungiu is the author of a realistic work with radiographic precision, ultra-sensitive to the nature of an era, past or present, even more to the restitution of its atmosphere. Films as important as 4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days (2007), Beyond the hills (2012), or Baccalaureate (2016) demonstrate this admirably. It is with the political climate of present-day Europe – the return of more or less extreme nationalisms, the rise of intolerance and racism, the neoliberal destruction of the common good – that R.M.N. This is what makes his new film exciting, especially since nothing is less easy to meet than this kind of challenge for anyone who wants to make a work of fiction.
“RMN” should read “IRM” in French. Why this title?
I see, in fact, my film as an attempt at a cerebral investigation of a reality that concerns us all today. The film sends us back the image of the internal mechanisms that govern us in a time of crisis, rising tensions, renewed extremism. It takes place in this case in a multi-ethnic village in Transylvania, but I think that everyone, everywhere in the world, will be able to recognize the same process that is at work.
Your film tackles the rise of populism and the extreme right in Europe head-on. Was this the idea from which you started or did it impose itself during the project?
Yes absolutely, I started from that reality. More particularly from a news item that took place in 2020 in Romania, in a small town where the Hungarian community, a minority in the country, is the majority here. The owner of an industrial bakery, not finding candidates on site, had to hire two foreign workers, arousing a strong reaction of nationalist rejection in this community, forcing them to leave the village. What immediately interested me in this story is that a national minority, itself the target of prejudice and therefore supposedly capable of empathy on this issue, turns in turn against another minority and demonstrates to its respect the same type of rejection. This is a big mystery to me. Why, in the same vein, do we Romanians, who are looked down upon when we go to work in Western Europe, behave in the same way with immigrants who work here? Why do we see, a priori, the other as an enemy and not as someone who looks like us?
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