“Kontinental ’25 is very much a film about talking the talk, but not really walking the walk.”
It is difficult to talk about Radu Jude’s latest film, world premiering at this year’s Berlinale in Competition, without giving its whole premise away. But think of mine as an experiment in review writing, much as the Romanian director’s work is often an experiment in filmmaking.
Kontinental ’25 begins with a homeless man, who ekes out a meager existence by collecting recyclables in an amusement park in Cluj, a picturesque city in now Romanian Transylvania. A former athlete, the man curses a lot and spends his nights in the boiler room of a building slated to be demolished. In its place a boutique hotel called Kontinental will be erected, but not before the inconvenient squatter is evicted. In comes Orsolya, the bailiff assigned to carry out the eviction. Her encounter with the man, and the result of him taking matters into his own hands – quite literally – will change her life.
We learn that Orsolya is herself a kind of outsider, a woman of Hungarian origins who converted to Orthodox Christianity to marry her Romanian husband. She is played by a phenomenal Eszter Tompa, who is also a member of Romania’s Hungarian minority, thus bringing an extra layer of enchantment to her part. Orsolya is like most when she sees injustice: she wishes to do something about it. But also like most, it often ends up with misguided efforts and a lot of talk. In fact, Kontinental ’25 is very much a film about talking the talk, but not really walking the walk. The ending, which of course will never be disclosed here, proves this point in every way.
Surrounded by her friends, her family and her co-workers, and even a former law student-turned-delivery boy she taught in her Roman Law class, Orsolya goes about trying to find forgiveness for what she feels is her responsibility in what happened to the homeless man she tried to evict. She even confesses to a priest, in a courageously filmed sequence which captures their dialogue from behind. This may be an Orthodox priest our protagonist is talking to, but Jude’s latest film is unorthodox in many ways, including his choice to shoot it on an iPhone 15.
This moral activism, which in the Berlinale program is phrased as “Orsolya’s moral relativism”, is something we can all relate to. We write “#CEASEFIRENOW” in capital letters when it comes to Gaza, and demand the rights of this people and that person to be respected, yet we never move into action. It is this kind of TikTok militance that makes Jude’s choice of a phone as his camera, operated by veteran Romanian DoP Marius Panduru, simply brilliant. While we use it to express our discontent with the world around us and then do nothing to make it better, Jude uses the cell phone to create art – which may or may not change the world, depending on our belief in the power of cinema.
Kontinental ’25 stands apart from all of Jude’s previous works in its simplicity, though it does possess some of his tropes, like sex scenes that aren’t sexy, characters talking at each other instead of to each other, the unmoving camera. It may not be his best work to date but according to Jude the idea for the story had been with him for a long time, thus perhaps making Kontinental ’25 one of his earlier films, and the work of a younger auteur. Even the director himself admitted in the film’s press kit that Kontinental ’25 is “different in its simplicity. The dialogue, the minimal mise-en-scène, and the focus on words make it a bit different when compared to the rest of my work.” And I have to agree, though his hand is unmistakable throughout.
As the Berlinale synopsis for the film points out, Kontinental ’25 is Jude’s homage to Roberto Rossellini’s Europa ’51, in its use of a meager budget and simple choices to express something huge. But it is also, according to Jude himself, inspired in form by Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and to understand why you’ll have to watch the film. I’ll personally add that Kontinental ’25 does for the kind of ugly, overbuilt cardboard-boxy architecture that cheapens the look of classically stunning cities like Cluj all over Europe, what Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist did for the Brutalist style of architecture: it draws our eye to it, and in the process doesn’t allow us to walk by and ignore it ever again.
Image copyright: Raluca Munteanu