When he took the stage of the Students’ Culture House in Cluj before the world premiere of his newest film, MMXX, Cristi Puiu had only one thing to say – „I’d like to pick things up from where we left them in 2020, but I won’t do that.” After all, he knew better than anyone that his sixth feature, as abstract it may be at times, would speak for itself. And it will do so not just because of its inevitable extra-text – both Puiu’s controversial presence in the media across the past three years, shadowed by his conspiratorial and inflammatory statements about the pandemic, and the absence of a more prestigious festival slot, say, in Cannes or Berlin – but, especially, due to its manifest content. That is, four vignettes set in the year that the pandemic broke out, whose final aim is to seemingly stare at us condescendingly while scolding us: “You absolute morons, you were looking in the wrong direction”.

Despite some sparks of genius in what regards its form – and, to give credit where credit is due, only one Puiu, with his incredible acuity of time and duration, would have been capable of –, MMXX is continually sabotaged by its author’s deeply-rooted political biases. This is something that would have been unimaginable for the Puiu of old, the one who turned the notion of ambiguity into an ultimate aspiration, one that reflected itself (with)in the limits of the image, of cinematic representation, and within a very episteme of reality, itself, for the one that transformed such a simple phrase – “I don’t know if you understand what I mean” – into the purest of revelations. Unfortunately, the wells have been poisoned. And the poison is the ideology that Puiu has been increasingly embracing since 2018: “I know you understand what I mean, and that you probably already have your mind made up about it – and in this case, you can go to fucking hell.”

Even Malmkrog, in its oblique fashion that encrypted – within discussions mostly related to theology – a political (or, rather, apocalyptical) vision that slanted towards the right, with classist and anti-cosmopolitan undertones, had within it the shine of a shadowy masterpiece, a dark star: even if only for the impeccable performance of Marina Palii in the role of Olga, or for the film’s usage of language to construct the hierarchical microcosm of this cloistered world on the verge of extinction (of course, this latter fact was a negative aspect within the film’s economy). However, this late political film that is MMXX is simply weak, both too scattered and too heavy-handed, which is tantamount to an act of (self-)sabotage that undermines most of the virtues of his body of work, which had rightly gained him a spot within the contemporary canon. And the fact that his erudition is put in the service of such a discourse is not inasmuch alarming (after all, no surprises here) as it is profoundly sorrowing.

A few words on the film’s four vignettes – starting with the first, shot in a long single take, debuting with the image of a woman sitting heads-down in an armchair (a world that is upside-down, as such), a therapist waiting for the arrival of a new patient. For anyone who has ever been to even a single session of therapy – because what we witness here is an absolutely grotesque caricature of any and all psychotherapeutic notions – it’s sufficiently clear that the intention is to undermine the process. What transpires is a transactional interplay in which the bored therapist ticks items off a questionnaire, and the patient weaves a tapestry of egomaniacal narcissism that verges on the sociopathic (as she, in what otherwise might seem to be a paradox in any other political vision, mentions some sensibilities that might seem “woke” – in the boomer sense of the term.)

An interruption within this first act – an unplanned visit of a young man, with an evidently hostile attitude towards the therapist – constitutes the pivot into its second outing: this time around, the camera is fluid, running along an apartment just like in Sieranevada, yet hectically edited. We see a few dozen minutes in which the act’s female protagonist is hounded by her brother (for reasons that seem deliberately childish: he’s lost some sort of kitchen utensil that he needs in order to bake a specific type of cake). All the while, her husband has locked himself into the bedroom and refuses to help her in her scattered flight of chores (cleaning, laundry, picking the kid up from his grandparents’). Suddenly, things are interrupted by what should be an “apocalyptic” call: an acquaintance of theirs enters childbirth and is not allowed to see her newborn because she’s tested positive for Covid, a drama unspooled between phone calls and opening-and-closing kitchen pantries. Of course, one is invited to regard this as an abuse that is heartless, aberrant, ridiculous, kafkaesque, etc. – while the representation of this woman subjected to what one might call domestic torture, one that is perfectly normalized within Romanian society),could allow for a critical reading of how said society treats women; of course, the unwritten rulebook of the Romanian New Wave says that any such critique means to explicitly show things “for what they are” in minute detail.

The third part contains the film’s biggest formal coup – which, unfortunately, is put in the service of a framing that is plainly bad and of a dialogue that is dull and meandering, taking place between the husband in the previous episode and a colleague of his, telling the story of how a one-night stand turned into a run-in with local mobsters – in what concerns the handling of time: its half-hour duration is defined by the duration of two consecutive COVID fast-tests, developing in real-time. Last, but not least, the last vignette – one that goes back to Puiu’s roots in Stuff and Dough (2001), with Dragoș Bucur performing the role of a police officer who, a short while after the cryptic suicide of a colleague (who quotes a poem by Nichita Stănescu, a canonical modern poet, in his farewell letter), investigates a harrowing case of human trafficking within the larger context of a funeral. The episode’s central scene, in which a female suspect recounts the horrific actions of a bloody cartel, brings to mind the closing scenes of Aurora (because the truth is unstable here, too). As much as this final episode espouses all of its director’s extraordinary qualities as a metteur-en-scene (since, at last, this is where one finally senses the Puiu of old), things are just as blood-curdling: not as much because of the infernal images that are conjured by the woman’s confession (bestial killings, apalling abuses), but through the ultimate layer of suggestion – meaning, the pandemic was nothing but an enormous manipulation that took the world’s attention away from organized criminality and its atrocities. It’s indisputable that Puiu is very courageous to grapple with such a blistering and acute topic in frontal fashion – but his choice to surround it with hours upon hours of sterile deadweight and lull it into a conspiracy-tinged discourse is an incredible failure, a delegitimizing act.

In fact, the pandemic „is not the point”, as young critic Șerban Mark Pop put it, observing that, despite all cliches, “the stories within the film can be totally detached from COVID-19, save for a few elaborate details or easily replaceable conventions” (however, I must say that, in contrast to Pop, I believe that the only vignette that is inextricable from the context of the pandemic is the third, rather than the forth – due to its formality). What I do find interesting, however, is Puiu’s propensity for citing his own work all across the film: be it literally (like the Nokia charger line from Lăzărescu, in the third episode) or formally (the cinematography of the second act), or certain narrative parallels (episode four starts with actor Dragoș Bucur driving his car down a countryside road, bordered by poplar trees), to name a few.

The four vignettes are interconnected by a series of tableaux set in a natural environment, one that is polluted with various kinds of rubbish (especially medical waste). It’s easy to decipher the underlying symbol: capital-N Nature is contaminated by humans, as the camera slowly glides above the surface of the earth, only to rise at the very end, focusing on the image of a family that is walking away. There is something rudimentary, that almost calls to mind the simplistic metaphors deployed in the propagandist films of socialist realism (just at the opposite pole – collectivism is substituted by individualism), in this final shot, something perfidious about this nuclear family “walking into the sunset” with their backs turned at the camera, meaning, these people who have freed themselves from “dogma”, leaving behind a sick society, following their path with an iron resolve – the correct path, of course, that of people who “think for themselves, decide for themselves, act for themselves”.

It must be said that Puiu is the sole author of the film’s final episode – the other three are co-written together with the students of a famous private film acting school in Bucharest, one which charges a pretty penny. I can’t help but find something sad in this: for some, this is just how the free market functions, adjusting itself depending on supply and demand, etc.; for others, such as myself, the idea that one might buy oneself into gaining a role (both as an actor and as a scriptwriter) in a film directed by one of the century’s most important filmmakers is just absolutely depressing. (The trajectory of one, say, Silvia Pinal towards the set of one Luis Buñuel seems more honest – but there are no Viridianas here, nor any devil-woman like the one in Simon of the Desert.)

Another sour note is the film’s screening within the milieu of a TIFF Cluj that is increasingly conservative in terms of discourse, a festival that tries to dance the long pirouette between „Make Film, Not War!” and a retrospective Oliver Stone from one year to another. A TIFF that is harder and harder to see under any other logic than that of discursive opportunism (bad publicity is still publicity, right?): the courage of filmmakers is endlessly lauded, but nobody mentions what exactly this courage is related to. What matters is that the artist is courageous, that they say whatever they have on their minds, no matter if it’s going to offend. The content of what they are saying? Or even, the way they’re saying it? Well, whatever. The only thing that matters is that they just do it.

Still, I’m struggling to decrypt the intentions behind this film – which, as I said earlier, are inseparable from the political credo of its director, and the only vaguely pertinent answer that I managed to arrive at is related to the notion of death. After all, even if one were to discount the myriad interviews in which he has declared his obsession with this theme since 2005, it’s clear that all of Puiu’s films are about death. And so, as such, an event just like the pandemic – a cataclysm of such enormous proportions that it simultaneously disrupts the vast majority of human lives on the planet, can lead to two distinctive types of conclusions for a personality (both in the regular and artistic sense) that is so preoccupied, so consumed by the idea of death. The first option is a a refusal, a rebellion of sorts: now that everyone is constantly thinking about death, the topic seems to have been trivialized, that is, it has been defiled, and desecrated. The second option is a paradoxical sense of liberation: the ubiquity and imminence (or rather, immanence) of death leads to a sort of release, to being freed from the claws of this atavistic fear, but also to a sort of recoil. Maybe it’s both. Maybe it’s neither. Who knows, at this point.

What I can, indeed, be sure of is that I’m far from being its ideal spectator – and maybe it’s because I have never been afraid of my own death, especially never in the pathological sense: nor literally, not in the abstract. And this might be the where very crux of such empirical and epistemological games of interpretation lies. After all, what is cinema if not death at the speed of 24 frames per second, to paraphrase Mulvey? Despite all of its efforts, MMXX is not the film to shine a light on this inextricable link – or, in general, on anything at all: be it the pandemic, the deeply-rooted social problems that plague Romania, or the psychology/morality of humankind. The ultimate, and as of yet uncontested (Romanian) chronicle of the pandemic remains Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging – and not so much because it’s situated at the very opposite end of the political spectrum (and that I very much identify with it), but because it’s a film that is alive and breathing.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.