Deep into “R.M.N.,” an anatomy of the human condition, this powerhouse of a movie gets deeper, creepier and unnervingly familiar. At that point, dozens of residents in a Romanian village have gathered for an impromptu town hall. Now, crammed together, the attendees — lovers, family, friends and neighbors whom you’ve come to know and sometimes like — clamorously voice their issues with some newly arrived foreign workers. The townspeople are suspicious, resentful, ridiculous and violently, explosively bigoted; they’re also terrifying.
I’ve called the movie an anatomy, but this scene is more of an autopsy. In some 15 tour-de-force, uninterrupted minutes, the writer-director Cristian Mungiu exposes the absurdity of this body politic, of these so-called concerned citizens, laying bare their grievances, prejudices and tribal affiliations. Some attendees speak (and shout) in Romanian, others in Hungarian. A French visitor — a conservationist for an NGO and a symbolic representative of the European Union — bleats a few conciliating sentiments but is scornfully shut down. The people have spoken and not on behalf of peace, reconciliation, democracy and human rights.
That’s unsurprising and bleak. But Mungiu’s touch is so deft and his filmmaking so enlivening, and the villagers so laughable (if also scary!), that you never feel dragged down or punished by the ugliness. Mungiu — a towering figure in the Romanian New Wave — is a tough, unsparing filmmaker, but he isn’t a scold or didact, the kind who delivers grindingly obvious life lessons about the horrors of other people. He’s interested in what makes human beings tick and why. But he’s a skeptic, not a cynic, and his approach is diagnostic rather than moralizing, which gives you room to meet his work on your terms.
“R.M.N.” is set in motion by Matthias (Marin Grigore), a hulking brute who stalks the movie like a threat. After a brief prologue, it opens with him working in a meat-processing plant in Germany. There, amid the baaing of soon-to-be-butchered sheep, he proves he’s an apex predator by viciously head-butting a hectoring manager who sneeringly refers to him as a Gypsy. As other workers raise the alarm, he flees and then catches a ride back to his Transylvania town, a village flanked by mountains that’s some 250 miles from Bucharest. He moves back in with his wary wife and young son, and pursues and beds a former lover.
