If a film such as “The Irishman” or “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” is unnecessarily long, then what will people say about “Malmkrog,” Cristi Puiu’s three-and-a-half-hour period adaptation? Focused almost entirely on the intellectual discussions of five aristocrats gathered at a wintry Transylvanian mansion in the early 1900s, “Malmkrog” belongs to the milieu of cerebral art-films whose arduousness is perhaps exactly the point. Cinephiles with a taste for the hardcore, painful pleasures of slow cinema, are encouraged to read further, but it’s difficult to recommend this feature to the movie-goer unacquainted with or baffled by the sorts of films in which “nothing happens.” Imagine “My Dinner With Andre” without the intimacy and zany charisma. By contrast, Puiu’s interlocutors remain at a distance, heightened by the filmmaker’s surreal flourishes. In any case, should you be willing to embrace its formal provocations and intentional tedium, the film offers a bewitching, and deeply haunting experience, one that ambitiously probes the relationship between language and history.
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The story takes place over the course of a single day and within the elegantly decorated quarters of a mountainside estate—the real-life Apafi mansion located in a village known by German speakers as Malmkrog. It draws directly from an 1899 book “War, Progress and the End of History: Three Conversations Including a Short Story of the Antichrist,” by the Russian mystic philosopher Vladimir Solovyov. Suffice it to say, it’s not the most obvious material for translation into a visual medium. But Puiu’s ambitious rendering speaks to that difficulty, with little concern for those it loses in the process.
Considered a leading figure of the Romanian New Wave, Puiu is perhaps best known for his Kafkaesque tragic farce, “The Death of Mr. Lǎzǎrescu” (2005). Since then, however, recognition for the filmmaker has slowly diminished, with his last feature, the engrossing chamber drama “Sieranevada” (2015), not even receiving U.S. distribution. That says less about the Romanian auteur’s talents than the growing incompatibility of his vision with certain standards of cinema. Like “Sieranevada,” “Malmkrog” uses duration to alienate language. Consequently, the comparison to ‘Andre’ is misleading—as much as “Malmkrog” revolves around a series of conversations, Puiu’s project is less about the content of these dialogues than how beliefs, through the medium of language, are diminished, twisted, and neutered when released into a vacuum-like reality. For a first-time viewer, focusing too intently on the dense stream of dialogue (conducted in French, the language of European intellectuals) will prove frustrating. Keeping up with the captions draws away from the film’s true riches—the subtle complexities of its mise-en-scène
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Split up into six chapters that correspond roughly to new topics of debate, Puiu captures through physical gestures and masterful choreography the vacuous, sports-like competition between five debaters: Nikolai (Frédéric Schulz-Richard), the host who gets a kick out of berating the youngest member, Olga (Marina Palii), for her pacifist idealism; Edouard (Ugo Broussot), who extols the virtues of Eurocentrism; Ingrida (Diana Sakalauskaité), a militarist who views war as a natural means of justice-seeking; and Madeleine (Agathe Bosch), the most noncommittal of the bunch whose overriding pessimism aligns most closely with the thrust of the book. From a late-morning parlor room chat about the moral boundaries of murder to a heated discussion about the Antichrist and the resurrection over dinner, the practically uninterrupted conversation covers an impressive breadth of subjects that trace Western civilization’s weightiest political and religious developments.
There’s something of Luis Buñuel’s mordant social critiques here but brought down several notches from the plain absurdity of the Spanish surrealist’s interminable dinner parties. Our debaters grapple with incredibly serious matters with a certain egoistic pleasure; as such these heady topics are rendered somewhat trivial. Puiu’s masterful blocking sees entire dialogues captured from the vantage point of another room, displaying multiple characters in a single shot; their movements and postures in relation to one another, and the camera, are more revelatory than their words. Beliefs and worldviews are subsumed into bodied identities, pawns in a knotty game of speeches and diatribes. Meanwhile, the butler István (István Téglás) and his waiting staff silently sashay in and out of rooms with cool, nervous restraint. The internal rhythms of this stratified household are set in stone, but there’s a tension underscoring even the most negligible actions—the pouring of tea, the pulling out of chairs—that suggests something threatens to burst.
Puiu creates a battleground only to exalt its artifice, its lack of real stakes. An outdoor chorus interrupts the group’s discussion—as does Olga’s fainting spell, and an armed insurrection that seems to bring down one of the party’s members. Yet nothing is made of these sudden outbursts. Each of these moments is followed by a title card that introduces a new “chapter.” And though the story progresses linearly, with day fading into night, our players seem to move on from any notable distractions as if they never happened in the first place. Such choices lend the film its uncanny quality, as does the otherworldly, white winter light spilling in through the windows.
For as much as the five rely on their vast pools of knowledge, and on evidence from their authoritative texts and scriptures to advance their arguments, they glide past the beauty and violence that takes place in the present. Perhaps Puiu is trying to tell us something about the ease with which the privileged classes regain their footing, and amnesically set out on their inward-looking lives? The redundancy of the film’s verbal sparring seems to make the point that such philosophizing exists for its own sake, divorced from a reality that has consequences and draws blood. Is the extended runtime necessary? Maybe, maybe not. Stewing in the film’s carefully crafted atmosphere of hypocrisy is, however, essential; values and attitudes deconstruct when they’re oversoaked. But make no mistake, the ride will be demanding. [B]
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