Kontinental '25

Part of my coverage of the 61st Chicago International Film Festival

KONTINENTAL '25   ***

Radu Jude

2025

IDEA:  A bailiff in the Romanian city of Cluj faces a moral crisis after a homeless squatter she evicts kills himself.

BLURB:  In Roberto Rossellini’s Europe ’51, a complacent socialite in postwar Italy has her social conscience awoken following the death of her young son, causing her to devote her life to charity for the poor. Radu Jude’s Kontinental ’25 caustically reworks Rossellini’s humanist masterwork for the fractured, globalized late-capitalist present. The selfless altruism and rectitude epitomized by the beatific Ingrid Bergman are nowhere to be seen here; instead, we have Eszter Tompa’s crumpled, self-pitying Orsolya, whose feelings of crushing guilt related to the suicide of a homeless man lead not to sociopolitical action and solidarity but to an endless ruminative loop of egocentric rhetorical debates. Shot, like most of the film, on a locked-down, autofocusing iPhone 15, these long-take dialogues invariably go like so: Orsolya describes the precise process of the homeless man’s suicide to an interlocutor and desperately seeks absolution, and the interlocutor tries to console her by invoking the perspective of history, current events, or parables. Sometimes, Jude wryly sticks a piece of consumer technology at the edge of the screen, or has club music playing in the background, ribbing a society of distraction in which the here-and-now of systemic inequities are never meaningfully addressed. Disregarding Jude’s exciting penchant for dense intertextuality, we have seen this sort of critique of bourgeois acedia before in contemporary European cinema, and there can be the sense, as in many of those critiques, that Jude is complicit in the liberal guilt he bemoans. On the other hand, he is an artist, not a politician or humanitarian, and Kontinental ’25 is another of his probing, prickly opuses.