Peaceful green forests are streaked with sunlight, giving the air a golden colour. A scruffy-looking man, Ion (Gabriel Spahiu), enters the field. He mumbles profanities as he picks up empty plastic bottles and cans discarded in nature. A huge, colourful dinosaur appears next to the man, moving and making noises. For a second, the viewer is transported back in time to Jurassic Park, then everything becomes clear: the man is walking through a deserted theme park. He talks to a velociraptor, dives into the half-shelled egg of a diplodocus, and smokes a cigarette next to a spinosaurus. Before retiring to his hideaway, Ion’s day continues through the tables of the city centre’s outdoor cafés. There he asks the customers for money. Many are annoyed by his presence and give him some change, only to get rid of him, to make him disappear, as if his presence were ruining the image of the historic city. There is so much dissonance in this first sequence to promise what is yet to come: an alienating journey of redemption through guilt and hypocrisy that will leave you shaken from head to toe and with many questions in your head. Kontinental ’25 by Romanian director Radu Jude starts with one of the most astonishing opening scenes of this 75th Berlinale, where it premiered on Wednesday and is competing for the Golden Bear.
Orsolya (Eszter Tompa) is a bailiff. Her job is to evict Ion from the basement of a historic building bought by a German investment fund that wants to destroy it and replace it with a boutique hotel. When she arrives, Ion is not ready to leave, although she has given him an extension and even organized a van to move his belongings. Ion is given another twenty minutes to collect his things, and Orsolya and the law enforcement guards leave to get a coffee nearby. When they return, Ion is dead, having strangled himself by wrapping a metal wire around his neck and tying it to the radiator. Orsolya’s legal innocence is immediately declared, but guilt and remorse begin to assail her, as sexist and racist slurs on social media do when it is discovered that she is of Hungarian origin. Orsolya is so affected by the whole affair that she decides not to go with her family to holiday in Greece and stay at home to reflect on her life and “make some decisions”. In the days following Ion’s suicide, Orsolya meets with her cynical mother (Annamária Biluska), a good friend (Oana Mardare), a Zen ex-law student (Adonis Tanta), and an Orthodox priest (Serban Pavlu) to talk about what has happened. With each of them, she seeks absolution rather than honest exchange and confrontation.
In 2021, director Jude won the Golden Bear for Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, about the moral, and not only, the trial of a teacher whose homemade sex tape is leaked on the Internet. As director Jude put it at the premiere’s press conference, Kontinental ’25 is also a dramatic comedy “about a moral crisis, and I usually hate that kind of film, but I hope this is interesting because it is out of place” and “there is a comic side to everything”. Director Jude goes on to argue that issues such as gentrification, inequality, racism and sexism should be approached “from the field of economics and history, … and not from metaphysics”, as Orsolya, the protagonist in this film, actually does. In her life, she is at a very simple and obvious material crossroads. Through her work, she takes from the poor to give to the rich, and she could just stop, but she doesn’t want to. She refuses to face up to her responsibilities. Instead, she seeks empathy and solace. This is most evident when, without thinking, she donates 500 euros to a charity that takes care of a Roma family, or when she shows her friend how strong her sense of civic responsibility is by donating 2 euros every month to all sorts of charities. In post-communist Romania, money seems to fix everything, at least for those who have it. And those who don’t? Well, too bad, that does not seem to be Orsolya’s problem, although she is a good citizen and, at least to some extent, a compassionate human being, after all, she tries to avoid evictions in winter.
Kontinental ‘25 was filmed in just ten days. The sequences are shot from a fixed camera position, without changes in angle or depth, by Marius Panduru cinematographer and long-time collaborator of Jude. Articulated dialogues are interrupted by sequential plans of the city, its nature and architecture. Soviet-style apartment blocks alternate with contemporary skyscrapers and Austro-Hungarian buildings. The colours are vivid but realistic, as are the characters, who are incredibly lively but also resemble ancient archetypes. The mother, like all mothers, is the only one who seems to dare to tell Orsolya what she doesn’t want to hear. The friend is Orsolya’s mirror, because they live in the same comfortable bubble, and she is also looking for redemption for her cruel deeds. The former law student is a lost soul. He is an incredibly well-drawn symbol of a generation that has been screwed by its parents but is trying to hold it together by embracing neoliberal New Age bullshit and mindful nonsense. Yet he is also pragmatic enough to write his ethnicity on his delivery rucksack in order to be respected by aggressive drivers. The actions of every single character are very precise, there is nothing superfluous in Kontinental ‘25, not a word, not a shot, a bit like in early cinema. As Jude himself said, in this phase of his production, he is trying to go back to the Lumière, to the essential, “and it felt very liberating!”.
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