Dir: Radu Jude 2025 109′
Reviewed by Peter Herbert
Radu Jude is a filmmaker carrying one of the brightest torches for Romanian cinema. After the end of communism and Romania’s entry into the EU in 2007, a new wave of filmmakers are exploring a range of human conditions alongside critiques of controlled authority.
This tradition of socially realist independent filmmaking, bookended by Radu Jude since 2007, contains a diverse range of outings including more recent films with increasing levels of satirical fun aimed at poking the belly and soul of Romanian states of mind. Kontinental ‘25 reigns in the humour but not the director’s lightness of touch.
The film opens with an elderly man foraging rubbish bins in parks and streets as he gleans meagre items to help survival in contemporary Transylvania. He lives in sheltered accommodation in Cluj-Napoca and arrives home to find bailiffs and law enforcement officers ready to evict him for nonpayment of rent.
The bailiff assigned to evict him is a young woman Ossolya who has previously sympathetically delayed the eviction and is now forced to complete his eviction. After she leaves his room and returns later, a dreadful incident has happened which shifts the focus of the film onto her complicity with a bureaucratic social system that, as in many cities, often fails to support vulnerable inhabitants.
Jude explores the aftermath of tragedy. Ossoyla decides not to join her husband and family on a weekend holiday away from home, needing time and space to process how her life has been impacted. As if in a midsummer night’s dark dream of a weekend, she embarks on a serendipitous journey, by day into night, through streets, parks and alley ways. Passing political monuments, theme park dinosaurs and shop windows, television screens project consumer advertising. There will be a startling sexual encounter in the open air at night time, enabling human connections that will peel away further layers of mind and body.
The film is carried by Eszter Tompa’s performance as Ossolya. As with women at the heart of Bad luck Banging or Loony Porn 2021 and Do Not Expect Too Much from The End of The World 2023, the filmmaker reveals awareness and empathy for female energy, sense and sensibilities.
Although the spontaneous nature of the film has been scripted, it was also made as if on the hoof on an iPhone over ten days. The result is reminiscent of the naturalistic realist cinema of Hungarian filmmaker Marta Meszaros with a similar feeling for women confronting critical issues of life in Eastern European society.
Kontinental ‘25 contains no overlaid music or close-ups and is filmed with mid-range and/or longshot compositions in sequences edited for pace and speed. There are exceptions with three scenes involving matter-of-fact conversations. These involve longer slow cinema single takes and compositions either in front of or behind two people interacting with each other. The camera view point and interaction between actors is far from static with thoughts and feelings that flow as if there are multiple ways to process what is happening.
As an odyssey of self-discovery, more intimate than epic, with a zen Buddhist like gentleness, the film feels like a version of Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story reimagined by Radu Jude as Transylvania Story.
With a beginning, middle and warmly open conclusion, the compassion and humanity at the heart of Kontinental ‘25 makes for what may well be the filmmaker’s most warm, embracing and accessible film so far. Peter Herbert
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