R.M.N. - Mark Reviews Movies

R.M.N., IFC Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 27, 2023

The whole of the world has changed in terms of how and where things are made, and that's just the economic side of matters. Such are, at least on one hand, the primary concerns of characters in R.M.N., which is set in a Romanian village that has experienced a lot of change in recent decades. Just about everyone is miserable, and as a result, they're looking for something to blame.

As is that unfortunate human tendency, though, most of the folks in this village decide upon someone—namely, various groups of someones—to blame. Those people are immigrants and legal workers from other countries, anyone associated with the European Union, and the heads of a local factory bakery, who hire workers from Sri Lanka instead of doing nothing, apparently, when no one from the village chose to apply for those jobs.

It's a bit more complicated than all of that, of course, and that might be why writer/director Cristian Mungiu's film, which serves as an unsettling dramatization of modern-day anxieties and fears and prejudices, seems to wander aimlessly toward a conclusion. That's not just a figurative description of what happens within this film.

The story literally has a character ambling around the village during the climax, in a scene that suggests there's a lot more happening in the backdrop that is more in line with what Mungiu has provided during the narrative. The story's punch line, which seems to suggest that the whole of humanity is made up of immigrants or invaders within the order and harmony of nature, is a potent one—if that's actually what the point is, of course. The screenplay has so much on its mind that it feels unfair to sum up the whole of this as a gag or as a singular statement, but then again, it also feels a bit unfair that Mungiu's multiple character, plot, and thematic threads arrive at such a point.

Until then, though, the story is compelling and haunting in its details about this tight-knit community, continuing to diminish for various reasons. The first is a relative lack of jobs, leading many, such as one of the film's central figures Matthias (Marin Grigore), to seek employment outside of the country. When we meet the man, he is working at a factory in Germany, away from his wife Ana (Macrina Bârlǎdeanu) and young son Rudi (Mark Blenyesi). After shoving his boss through a glass door for interrupting a phone call home, Matthias has to flee Germany and return to his hometown.

Matthias comes to serve as a fascinating figure, mainly because of how Mungiu establishes some initial sympathy for the man—being away from home and, possibly, treated so poorly that he lashes out in such a way. Looks, though, aren't so much deceiving here as they are exactly what they seem. Upon returning home, Matthias reveals himself to have, yes, a temper and to hold rather conservative views that define how poorly he treats his wife and to be a hypocrite, in that his marriage is on very shaky ground after he had an affair with Csilla (Judith State).

She's the manager, by the way, of the factory bakery, which is looking of a couple of new employees. Having lived in this village her entire life, Csilla knows enough about the local population and the general complaints of local laborers to ensure the job flyers emphasize double-paid overtime, but despite her best efforts to hire people from the village, no one applies. Instead, her boss (played by Orsolya Moldován) hires a pair of men from Sri Lanka, and suddenly, a large portion of the village is upset that the factory didn't hire anyone local.

As that main story thread unfolds, Mungiu weaves a detailed and expansive tapestry of the lifestyle and general worldview of the people within a place like this village. Most of it revolves around despair, suggested immediately by the film's opening scene, in which young Rudi sees some horrifying sight in the forest on his way to school and is unable to speak after that. The local mine, a steady source of employment for decades, closed down some number of years ago, leaving most of the population to survive on welfare payments or by traveling to other countries for work.

That they don't see a similar plight between themselves, their family members, and their friends in the two workers from Sri Lanka is an expected sort of social tragedy, perhaps. After all, these are people who travel with their local hockey team for a match against a neighboring village's team ready with weapons for a fight. The only discernable reason is that even the people in that nearby village aren't their "own kind."

It's little surprise, then, how a majority of the population turn on the foreign workers. There are a lot of "reasons" and "justifications" for their prejudice, as wide-ranging as "hygiene concerns" and religion and , but the simple and awful thing about it is that the problem simply comes down to the fact that certain people don't like those they consider to be "different." Mungiu gives us a lengthy town hall meeting, at the same time focusing on facet of how controlling and pathetic Matthias is, that allows all of those complaints to erupt and fester, surviving multiple contradictions and attempts at appeasement.

There are more personal stories here, too, mainly to do with Matthias' familial relationships and his extramarital one, but they exist in R.M.N. to be mined for and reflected in the underlying tale of a village on the brink. This is a realistic and ugly portrait, to be sure, and if there's one positive about the anticlimactic deflection of the ending, it's that it spares us what's likely the inevitable outcome.

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