Film Review – R.M.N. (2022)

Romanian director Cristian Mungiu is a celebration of filmmaking, for his polarizing, often brutal realism (‘4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days’-2007, ‘Graduation’-2016, ‘Beyond the Hills’-2012). His newest film sets to deliver yet another allegory for the nature of human behaviour over the picture of sheep, trees, and conflicts (the homey kind for the Scandinavians) and actually wins the game.

Somehow suggested by the title (R.M.N. is a Romanian loan acronym for MRI, referring to a brain scan trying to detect malfunctions below the surface), the film has enough layers to serve its purpose and satisfy any dramaturgy spot. Right before Christmas, Matthias is leaving his work in a slaughterhouse in Germany, to return to his former home in a small Transylvanian village, where he reunites with his son and his estranged wife. At once, he gets confronted with the fears of his eight-year-old son, that scared the boy to mute, his ex-lover, now a divorced leader of a bakery, and the lack of will among the community to work locally. Meanwhile, his father, the caretaker of sheep that slowly go missing, needs increasingly medical help.

It might sound a ton for a single film, but there is a factor that glues things together in a single trick. Masculinity is stretching throughout the story, defeated by a fair amount of overall atoned ethics; Matthias is inducing archetypical survival means to his confounded son, while utterly disapproving of him engaging with crochet as urged by his mother. She explains, ‘It’s a soothing and therapeutic activity’ meant to acknowledge the kid as an imperfect and sensitive human being. The primmest male degradation, though, is orchestrated (unwillingly) by his ex-lover, when he gets caught masturbating in her backyard and quickly makes excuses for his visit to offer her a piece of meat from the freshly butchered pig by his own hands, which she eloquently declines, as she (naturally) has stopped eating meat. You get the joke, I hope.

It is sad to admit, but this story, in the exemplary landscape of the Romanian province (although any European province will do as well, especially in the East), reads at points as a documentary. It is hardly surprising that the story is based on the true incident of 2020 when residents of the central Romanian commune of Ditrău boycotted a bakery for employing South Asian workers. ‘R.M.N.’ suggests that institutional racism is progressing, along with the restoration of gender inequality, but cultural discrimination is reigning, often as an excuse to express xenophobia on a personal level. And so, ‘R.M.N.’ gives a strong portrait of how racism finds foster grounds in small communities fed by traditions, family bonds, and patriotism.

Cristian Mungiu is definitely not afraid of facing prejudice and bigotry. He keeps a balanced, progressive attitude towards all the involved characters and paints his picture his a plenitude of wide shots, forming tensions and complexities with an attentive perspective. He is addressing many underrepresented social intricacies, but he is not choosing sides. Rather, he passes on the judging torch to the external eye of the viewer. Ultimately, his story doesn’t condemn racism, but it does give some slaps to hate (masculinity included) and leaves plenty of space to reconsider the notion (and value) of home.

‘R.M.N.’ premiered at the Cannes Film Festival 2022, and by now it’s easily considered a classic. Search for it in your local theatres or online platforms.