By Lawrence Garcia

Cristian Mungiu’s latest state-of-the-nation address, R.M.N., takes its title from the Romanian acronym for nuclear magnetic resonance—a phenomenon familiar from its use in various forms of medical imaging, such as brain scans. And the director’s diagnosis, as it were, is clear enough. Centred on a Transylvanian town whose inhabitants push back with increasing violence against a local bakery’s hiring of three Sri Lankan immigrants, the film exposes various strains of virulent racism and nativist bigotry. As is often the case in Mungiu’s work, this comes with a few overtly allegorical touches: an old man suffering from an unspecified brain injury; a young boy who has lost the ability to speak after encountering an unknown horror in the woods; the ubiquitous threat of wild bears, presumably meant to symbolize what happens when humans are reduced to pure territorial instinct. 

More compelling than these portentous touches, though, is the film’s gradual accretion of small-scaled behavioural detail, especially as it relates to body language and gesture: the suddenness and force with which a man headbutts a boss who insults him; the interactions of a husband and wife whose marital bond has long expired; a man’s inability to say “I love you” in Romanian. (The film includes Romanian, Hungarian, English, German, and French dialogue, and is attentive to the purely expressive, non-semantic qualities of each.) Mungiu brings these details to a head in R.M.N.’s centrepiece scene: a town-hall meeting about the foreign workers, filmed in a single 17-minute shot and featuring 26 speaking parts. Clearly calculated to impress, the passage showcases how Mungiu’s taste for intricate plotting and dense compositions dovetails perfectly with his acute sense of naturalistic observation. Less impressive, however, is R.M.N.’s logistically confusing and thematically muddled ending, which suggests that observing a symptom and offering a diagnosis entail somewhat different talents.

Lawrence Garcia