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Cristian Mungiu (2012)

A confrontation between a crazy individual and a crazy collective – hard to say which of them is the irresistible force and which the immoveable object.  Alina, the young woman who plays havoc with the severe and secure routines of an Orthodox convent in rural Romania, is more the latter when she’s tied down by the nuns and living on nothing but holy water; but her violent volatility has already threatened the physical safety of some in the community, as well as its modus vivendi.  The nuns’ beliefs may seem benighted.  Their treatment of Alina – as ‘Papa’, the male priest who’s the spiritual leader of an otherwise female group, tries to exorcise the demons in her – is brutal and eventually lethal.  Yet the nuns don’t mean to kill her; they think what they’re doing is for Alina’s own good.  And her behaviour is extravagantly unreasonable.  Alina arrives at the convent to be reunited with Voichita, her best friend and her lover in their days together in an orphanage, before Voichita joined the religious order.  The priority for Alina is to be with Voichita, preferably in Germany, from where Alina has recently returned, but within the confines of the convent if that’s the only possibility.

This is Cristian Mungiu’s first feature since 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (he directed one of the segments of Tales from the Golden Age in between).  His screenplay is based on non-fiction novels by Tatiana Niculescu Bran.   Beyond the Hills is intelligent and scrupulously put together but also formidably monotonous.  Many people in the audience will probably be satisfied by the movie simply because it provides a lengthy condemnation (the film runs 155 minutes) of a religious set-up that’s hysterically superstitious and repressive but I’m not among them – and Mungiu is clearly aiming for something more complex than this.  He, in effect, presents two case studies – Alina and the convent community – and poses the question:  who is the more dysfunctional and/or reprehensible?  He suggests that neither of them can help themselves:  certainly, the callous attitude of a doctor in the hospital to which Alina is taken (too late) is presented as worse than either party.   Yet, except for Alina and Voichita, the characters in the story remain largely under wraps (Black Narcissus it isn’t).  Because the people aren’t involving, the film’s themes are more salient and its limitations as a drama, as distinct from a description of events, become more of a problem.  This isn’t the fault of the excellent actors:  Cosmina Stratan (Voichita) and Cristina Flutur (Alina) shared the Best Actress prize at Cannes in 2012; Valeriu Andriuta makes a strong impression as the priest; and the supporting cast includes Luminita Gheorghiu in the small part of a school teacher.   Stratan is especially convincing, perhaps because Voichita is the human focus of the story, caught as she is between a rock and a hard place – between the tyranny of the Orthodox religious order and the personal tyranny of Alina.

There were things I didn’t understand in the plot.  I wasn’t sure, for a start, why the convent was so prepared to accommodate a lay person like Alina for so long.  Perhaps the idea is that this aberrant community feels compelled to take care of her in a way the ‘normal’ world isn’t prepared to do.  An attempt is made at one point for Alina to return to the foster family she hasn’t seen for some time.  I didn’t get this bit at all.  The foster mother seems to expect her to stay and Alina goes to what used to be her room in the house but it’s then revealed that the family have already rented it to someone else.  The last scene of the film is its best.   After Alina’s death, Papa and the nuns – including Voichita (who’s by now in civvies:  I assumed this meant she was so appalled by what had happened to Alina she was going to leave the convent) – are taken in for police questioning.   The camera focuses on the profiles of Voichita and Papa in the back of the police van and on the backs of the heads of the two policemen in the driver and passenger seats, who are having a conversation about a terrible murder that’s just been reported.   The implication, as the film returns from beyond the hills to the city, is that life there is no less alarmingly loco than life in the convent.  The faces of Viochita and Papa disappear from the frame.  The backs of the two heads remain as the policemen grumble on.  The van windscreen is splashed.  A windscreen wiper does its work in a perfunctory, rather hopeless way.

The physical landscape of the film, finely lit by Oleg Mutu, has been bleak throughout.  (The story takes place during winter:  the weather, like our own this year, seems to get worse as Easter approaches.)  Yet that bleary view out of the police van window still provides a climactic miserable outlook.    When he made 4 Months, Cristian Mungiu had the idea of a ‘Memories from the Golden Age’ project.  I assume this was overtaken by the portmanteau Tales from the Golden Age, all of which tell stories of Romanian life under the Communist regime.  Perhaps the gloomiest aspect of Beyond the Hills is that it takes place in a Romania nearly two decades on from Ceaușescu but the place seems as glum and poverty-stricken as before.  Although Beyond the Hills is heavy going and I think only partly successful, I hope Mungiu won’t take so long before he makes another feature.  His grim sense of humour is still evidently intact.  At one point, the nuns try to instruct Alina in Orthodox catechism, specifically the sins she should take care not to commit.  ‘How many are there?’ asks one nun.  ‘Four hundred and forty-one [or thereabouts]’, replies another, who begins to recite them.  For an astonishing moment, you think you’re going to get the full list but Mungiu cuts away after a dozen or so.

18 March 2013