By David D’Arcy

In Berlin, the closest thing to a consensus on Kontinental ’25 was that the film didn’t measure up to Romanian director Radu Jude’s customary standards. My view is that the critics didn’t look hard enough.

Eszter Tompa in a scene from Radu Jude’s Kontinental ’25. Photo: Berlin Film Festival

Kontinental ’25 is the latest film by the prolific Romanian director Radu Jude, 47. His amalgamation of satire and mourning and scatology won the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay at the Berlin International Film Festival.

The screenplay prize was an odd award for Jude to receive. Much of his film, shot in ten days with an iPhone 15 — gracefully, given the rushed schedule — comes off as improvised, barely scripted. Jude’s approach to filmmaking has always been irreverently personal. He described his last movie, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End Of The World, as “a film which, in its structure and mise-en-scène, is even more amateurish than my last films.” If only we could have Oscar acceptance speeches like that.

In Berlin, the closest thing to a consensus on Kontinental ’25 was that it didn’t measure up to Jude’s customary standards. My view is that the critics didn’t look hard enough.

With this director, as a writer noted several years ago, “[the] qualities that make Jude singular also threaten to keep him on the outskirts of distribution.” That’s an understatement, given his signature raunchiness, what we might call his obscene humanity. In the last few years, Jude’s public has broadened among cinephiles, but he still hasn’t won much popular success. There’s still time. Jude has made eight films in the last ten years and he’s not slowing down. Awards, however, may be another matter. Jude told Indiewire last year that the Oscars “have nothing to do with cinema.” That comment earned him more clicks than ticket buyers for his movies.

Kontinental ’25 is set in the once-Hungarian Transylvanian city of Cluj. Orsolya (Eszter Tompa) is a local official, a bailiff who enforces the court’s judgments. We meet her as she faces a moral dilemma: she’s finally evicting a pushy malodorous beggar, despised by his proper neighbors and their real estate agents. He won’t leave a basement crawl space where he sleeps. When Orsolya brings police to roust him, he asks for time to get his things together. When she returns, he’s strangled himself to death with an electrical cable.

The man’s suicide haunts the story, placing it in the shadow of the magisterial The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, a 2005 drama by fellow Romanian Christi Puiu, where a dying old man goes unattended when doctors can’t agree on a diagnosis.

Once again, it’s horror in the land of Dracula (the Transylvanian subject of what Jude says will be his next film). Orsolya the bailiff blames herself for the death. The cops comfort her, but she’s so racked with guilt that she sends her family off to their dream vacation in Greece without her. That’s unthinkable in today’s consumer-crazed Romania where, as Jude shows us, the new middle class is eager to live and be seen living like Europeans.

Kontinental’ 25 follows what seem like ordinary characters through special circumstances, whether it’s a homeless squatter testing the patience of the police or a local functionary bringing compassion – even moral clarity – to the job of evicting him. For Orsolya, it’s an odd journey through the absurdities of injustice as she quarrels with her mother in Hungarian over the Romanian “theft” of Transylvania, becomes intimate with a former student, and endures sophistries worthy of an ordained Dr. Oz offered by an Orthodox priest. Expressive reaction shots of Tompa observing it all as Orsolya recall the actress Giulietta Masina in Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria.

It’s a journey (around Cluj) of soul-searching, a trip that Jude packs with grim laughs, as in his previous films. These include Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021) in which a schoolteacher is put on public trial for a sex tape recorded by mistake that goes viral, and Don’t Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023), a wild takedown of corrupt Romanian entrepreneurship, an exposé of a self-exploiting gig economy. Rude stresses that his stories are rooted in observation rather than imagination. Take hm at his word, then brace for plenty of imagination.

What’s new for Jude in Kontinental 25 is a focus on the landscape. His home turf has been noisy overcrowded Bucharest, but Cluj is a picturesque town, though it now sprawls outward with generic new houses and identical apartment blocks. The vagrant who killed himself tried to sleep under one of them. Call it The Death of Mr. Lazarescu meets Euro-suburbia. Jude ends his film (sorry for the spoiler) with mute shots of Cluj’s new “architecture” – cookie-cutter houses whose sellers and owners are dead set against a homeless man sleeping in the building. These are also houses with secrets, such as a buried corpse in the basement.

Is that sprawl in Cluj meant to be seen as a spreading tide of public complicity in a man’s death? The film’s finale, a slide show picturing the built environment, seemed like a set of mute placeholders for a judgement that Jude he hasn’t quite found words for. Or it could be that his films are turning away from words altogether, unusual for a man who can talk as fast as Martin Scorsese. Jude noted his interest in silent cinema (and the Lumiere Brothers) when he mentioned his upcoming Dracula film at a Berlin press conference.

Jude says Kontinental’ 25 is an homage to Roberto Rossellini’s Europe 51 (1952), the saga of a wealthy woman drawn to philanthropy after the death of her son. It featured Ingrid Bergman, plus Giulietta Masina in a major role. The director also speaks of a kinship with Rainer Werner Fassbinder – the latter’s productivity, his range of styles, his fierce look at brutality and corruption. But not the drugs, Jude notes –“Fassbinder without the cocaine.” The insistent moral concern of Jude’s films also lack the measured classicism that Fassbinder achieved in Nora Helmer (A Doll’s House) and Effi Briest, although Jude’s period drama, the Ottoman-Balkan Western Aferim!, (2015) is a bawdy but carefully vivid recreation of a bygone era.

On the subject of Dracula, Jude told me last year that there has been no Romanian film on that subject, at least not in Romanian — “actually there is one made in English by a guy called Adrian Popovich in 2000. And it’s terrible. It’s one of the most horrible films. I said I can’t be worse than him.” Given how Jude views his own films, he might just give it a try.

Ben Whishaw in a scene from Peter Hujar’s Day. Photo: Berlin Film Festival

One film that charmed audiences in Berlin was Peter Hujar’s Day, an adaptation of photographer Hujar’s 1974 gossipy conversation with a friend who was planning a book of talks with artists from that time. Directed, discreetly, by Ira Sachs from a transcript made before the audio tape was lost, the effort features mannered performances by actors too young to know that era firsthand. Performers Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall give the film an apartment-framed intimacy – between friends, that is. Hujar (1934-87) was gay and often compared, favorably, to peer Robbert Mapplethorpe. 1974 was before Hujar’s stark black-and-white aesthetic — portraits and delicate landscapes –made him the artist that the wider world came to know. The film’s painstaking period production design makes it a delicate time capsule.

Also at Berlin, Dreams, directed by Michel Franco of Mexico. The film couldn’t be more timely. A well-meaning American socialite (Jessica Chastain) from a philanthropic family has a steamy involvement in liberal San Francisco with an undocumented Mexican ballet dancer (Isaac Hernandez). Social critique meets smartly tailored melodrama in a project that Chastain executive-produced. Melodrama wins out. This well-meaning moral venture deals clumsily with American border politics, but it does reveal the young dancer Isaac Hernandez to be a credible actor — this time held down by good intentions and a weak script.

David D’Arcy lives in New York. For years, he was a programmer for the Haifa International Film Festival in Israel. He writes about art for many publications, including the Art Newspaper. He produced and co-wrote the documentary Portrait of Wally (2012), about the fight over a Nazi-looted painting found at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.