Radu Muntean is probably the most important director that’s dead-set on not jumping off the ship that is the New Romanian Cinema. A ship that, in the end, proved to be a pretty narrow caravel, whose back rooms have since started to quickly fill up with water. But in contrast to one Cristi Puiu (who radicalized his explorations at the margins of esoteric), one Corneliu Porumboiu (who steered 180 degrees towards genre filmmaking, featuring a hit-laden soundtrack) or one Cristian Mungiu (who simply hasn’t released anything in past years), Muntean remained faithful to the formula that enshrined his name, persevering, for better and for worse, with his long single shots filled with blathering meant to pass the time. As such, even though it begins like a Ceylan, continues like a Cuaron and ends like a Kiarostami, Întregalde cannot be seen as anything else than a bona-fide Romanian film.

The problem of this particular filmography, which was built in a steady collaboration with the Răzvan Rădulescu-Alex Baciu scriptwriter duo, is that, in spite of its speeding block-start, with all of the transition’s themes under its belt (the legacy of the Revolution, the new middle class and its residential district dramas), it ended up losing its breath along the way and missing a couple of important trains, until it reached a dead end. What can a film like Alice T. (2018), Muntean’s previous directorial effort, even try whisper in our ears, other than the fact that its scriptwriters had some vague and outdated ideas about how things work like in society, idea onto which a story was cobbled together, which tries to make up for its gaps on the base of rumors? But its story – regarding a teenaged girl who ends up with an unwanted pregnancy on her hands – was still reeking of the gaze of some grandpa that was patronizingly looking down at the kids playing in his backyard. A pretty bad omen, regardless of the angle you’re looking at it from.

But still, where does all the fanfare come from? It’s due to the fact that Muntean’s cinema, however much it tries to bank in on its dribbles with the camera, fundamentally remains a cinema of lines, of a dialogue cut down to the comma, and synchronized with the generous seconds of the long single shot. And the line – a Rădulescu-esque reflex dating back to the scriptwriter’s collaborations with Puiu – must imperiously say something about the world that we are moving in; meaning, to chart the tendencies and to emit sentences, but in a backhanded way, and not simply spat into one’s face, as in the case of the apostles of the political Molotov. Social cinema camouflaged under a comelier form, as such, at a “leisurely pace” (this neorealism with a whiff of borscht), that, however – especially because of its attempt at being perfectionistic in terms of nuance – loses its tempo in front of a treadmill runner as Radu Jude, who has his share of agility and his sharp tongue, weapons that are useful in the service of an all-encompassing critique. And – in an apparently frivolous, yet only apparently question – what relevance is there left to a barely-guessable nuance in front of an impatient audience? With his most recent films, Radu Muntean seems to have increasingly lost his grip on reality.

Întregalde is, then, the film of a man that’s come from afar. A film all the more thrilling considering that it marks an interesting change in backdrop for this “chronicler of the Romanian middle-class”, as the filmmaker was labeled in the past. Even so, we are still in the backyard of the creative class, but seen from a different angle, since this film packs a bigger punch – closer to an episode of Bear Grylls than it is to a sociologically-tinged talk show – and with more sceneries – at least, we see places in a Radu Muntean film! – than all of his offerings since The Paper Will Be Blue (2006). Or, better said, the film does a good job at understanding and accepting that sometimes – most of the time – it’s better to say less and show more. Is it pure magic that an SUV stuck in the pasty mud looks better on screen than a couple of doctrinal dialogues shot on an affected tone? Not at all, since even nowadays, cinema remains so deeply rooted in the force of physical matters, that exist in front of the camera. It’s nothing new per se – short stories such as “Personal Development” by Lavinia Braniște or „The Last White Rhinoceros” by Bogdan Răileanu have already marked the terrain -, but it’s something new in Romanian cinema.

Such as in the case of most scripts that lie at the basis of Muntean’s films (from the scenes from a marriage in Tuesday, After Christmas to the Hitchcockian trama in One Floor Below), here, too, the premise is stale: three people get their car stuck on a forest road, and must somehow make arrangements for spending their time there overnight. As usual, genre films are winked at, but only towards the purpose of dodging them in the end. The film is correct in its consequence, and insofar it barely avoids becoming a survival movie dotted with tense music and unsubtle bear growls coming in from off-screen, also keeps itself at a safe distance from turning into a “what does a high-pressure situation do to one’s humanity” kind of story (still, there are a few such fragments in the plot, seemingly out of inertia). The bomb is quickly defused – nobody dies, not even close -, but we still have a couple of sequences, beautifully tackled by the director of photography Tudor Panduru, in which the two protagonists stumble in the dark amongst tree trunks and through the mire, their breaths steaming in front of the flashlights.

Speaking of the protagonists, I really like what Maria Popistașu, Ilona Brezoianu, and Alex Bogdan are capable of pulling off in a minor situation that runs the risk of becoming a major misfortune. There’s a lot of swearing in Întregalde, but it’s put to good use, and coming from Bogdan’s mouth, one charged with the mythology of all the commercials that he’s acted in, all of this comes across as both funny and threatening, and that is precisely what you’d expect from a man that is hounded by stress and sleeplessness, whose car has slipped into a ditch. Playing a miserable character, who’s also approachable and well-intentioned depending on the situation, in the way that only he could, Bogdan is like a breath of fresh air in a stuffy room, while Popistașu and Brezoianu are doing the dirty work, in the arena of gravity. Especially Popistașu, a quintessential actress of the Romanian New Wave, who is good to the degree to which she gathers onto herself all the layers of an intermediary generation, ready to align herself with the millennials with a well-targeted expression in English, but also to take on the responsibilities of a mother if she’s needed to.

Luca Sabin’s character, an old man who wanders the forest paths, babbling about various things, is the film’s center of gravity. I wouldn’t hurry to list him as an advantage, however. In a teaser posted a while ago, which showed a panoramic shot taken from within the stuck car, Luca Sabin seemed to be the dynamite stick thrown into a frozen and pedantic film, tattooed with the word “virtuosity” with a capital V. It’s not exactly like that, first of all, because the film is much more balanced than what said eye-catching shot inferred, and second of all because this character ends up being an untapped goldmine. Or, rather, tapped in a way that is not at all eco-friendly, since Luca Sabin – a splendid acting performance – comes across much more as a pretext for exoticism, in sequences where he’s seen in vulnerable states, robbed of his dignity and any understanding on part of the camera. Since if this “senile old man” – as he is harshly described in the synopsis – serves to shine a light on an underprivileged community, then he is highlighted, given a voice, etc.; if however, he serves as a blotch of color on a narration that is otherwise out of breath, to channel a sub-adjacent wish for poverty porn, then that’s scopophilia, and then our gramps is a victim. There’s a fine line at play, but I’m under the impression that the film steps over its boundaries one too many times – a moment in which any potential critique leveled at this handful of activists that might be kind, but are doubtlessly strangers in passing, draped in their colorful jackets and fleece sweaters, simply evaporate into thin air, and the film can then comfortably align itself with the corporate neo-conquistadors’ camp.

Întregalde doesn’t trigger any landslides, but it’s a squeaky-clean film, in the sense that it does its job – it delivers a “crisis” in the New Romanian Cinema’s well-known tradition -, however without authorizing any sort of madness or excess at its margins, à la João Pedro Rodrigues. When the long single shot, minimal editing, “dead times” and filler dialogue become more than a choice amongst other choices – and, thus, an imperative -, the night itself, with all of its narrative possibilities, is prevented from coming to life.

Întregalde held its world premiere in the Quinzaine des réalisateurs section of the Cannes Film Festival today.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.