Romanian director Radu Jude’s filmography is as defined by his scathing critiques of contemporary systems, culture, and society as it is by the lengthy titles that host them. Coming off the sprawling 163-minute satirical epic Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023), in which he left no stone unturned, appraising the many depths of modern hell, Kontinental ‘25 is abbreviated in both titular word count and topical focus. At nearly an hour less in runtime, Jude can’t possibly expunge the wide breadth of topics his previous effort encompasses. But for as simply constructed and contained as the iPhone-shot effort is, Kontinental ‘25 still offers an unredacted glimpse into the sociopolitical ills that plague our current way of life.
Based in Transylvania (which has its own political implications as a region only formally recognized as a part of Romania due to a controversial 1920 post-WWI treaty), Orsolya (Eszter Tompa) is a bailiff burdened with the thankless responsibility of evicting a homeless man, Ion (Gabriel Spahiu), from a cellar boiler room. She’s already campaigned to the respective jurisdictions to extend the squatter’s timeline. He’s a former athlete who has represented Romania after all. But the bargained extra month has expired, and the bureaucratic powers that be have come to exert their will. His temporary refuge is set for demolition to be replaced by a luxury housing development. This time, the presence of two Romanian paramilitary police officers gives him no choice but to cooperate.
Orsolya is at a moral crossroads over the situation and offers as much scant humanity to Ion as she can, given the degrading circumstances. She extends what futile dignity is available to him in the form of 20 minutes alone to collect his stray belongings before being relocated. He uses the time and liberty to hang himself from a radiator.
What transpires from this point on is primarily long-form dialogue surrounding Orsolya’s ethical reckoning with the event. It’s reiterated to everyone around her (bosses, friends, family, even a priest) that she has no legal burden. Everyone in her immediate radius assures her that it is not her fault and that she was just doing her job. That’s not convincing enough, however, to unshackle her psyche, nor free her from the scrutiny of the national press and keyboard warriors who have placed the story at the apex of xenophobic agendas and crude castigation.
With forces weighing down upon her internally and externally, Orsolya opts to stay home during her family’s holiday trip. The alone time is meant to afford her the space to reckon with the guilt, which translates to excruciatingly blunt retellings of Ion’s death to anyone who will listen, aimless wanderings through dinosaur statue parks, and a public hook-up with a former student turned food delivery driver. Through these events, Orsolya often acts as a mouthpiece for Jude’s neoliberal candor. She recounts the various causes she donates €2 to in recurring monthly subscriptions (Gaza, UNICEF, Ukraine, etc.), serving as both an indiscriminate laundry list of the world’s woes and insight into Orsolya’s passive activism.
For as much as the movie itself acts like a political side quest in form and function, it’s the surroundings that offer the most insight into Kontinental ‘25’s goals. We start with an unhoused man being evicted from property he doesn’t own and can never afford, and are consistently confronted with imagery of juxtapositions: historical architecture against corporate towers, poverty against wealth, hypocritical language against the power status of religious figures. All the while, Orsolya’s journey is marked by the construction of housing developments, and yet nowhere for Ion to exist.
There’s a starkness to the iPhone photography that Jude employs, almost anti-cinematic in its over-exposed capture of the modern world. The iPhone cameras often refocus mid-scene, which could be viewed as a simple technical mishap, but in repetition, it suggests a sense of obscenity in the images we’re consuming. To capture our contemporary state in pictorial terms would be a fabrication.
Kontinental ‘25 is a minimalistic venture by Radu Jude’s standards, but it still emphasizes an undeniable human truth: the system is built to protect certain people and, possibly with even more vigor, also built to keep others unprotected. The housing crisis is the most poignant of triggers that motivates this story, adding to the wide net of societal failures in the greater Radu Jude project to document in excruciating opaqueness a self-portrait of humanity’s blind tendency for self-destruction. Maybe we’ll one day have the hindsight to admire the vulgar honesty of our systemic injustices, but as Jude himself may suggest, it might already be too late.
Review Courtesy of Danny Jarabek
Feature Image Credit to 1-2 Special via OutNow