Four years after winning the Golden Bear for his irreverent satire “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” Romanian auteur Radu Jude returns to the Berlinale with his latest feature, “Kontinental ’25,” which premieres Feb. 19 in the festival’s main competition.
The film follows a bailiff, Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), who’s plunged into a moral crisis after a homeless man she’s trying to evict commits suicide. Struggling with a profound sense of guilt, she looks for ways to ease her troubled conscience, even as she grows increasingly desperate for external reassurance and validation.
Easier said than done. As you might expect from one of world cinema’s leading provocateurs, Orsolya’s round-about search for redemption detours toward Jude’s larger concerns, taking in (but hardly limited to) moral relativism, post-socialist economics, nationalism and the Romanian housing crisis. Where these subjects converge — and how a simple Everywoman like Orsolya responds to them — is perhaps the film’s biggest question of all.
“When we question our own reactions to tragedies, we often find them on the verge of ridicule,” Jude explains. Take the conscientious soul who posts her outrage over the war in Ukraine on social media before, seconds later, sharing a picture of her lunch. “I’m not judging — I do it too — but I find that there’s a comedic, almost Balzacian ‘human comedy’ in these contradictions. It’s less a satire and more a reflection of the absurdity and complexity of human reactions.”
Though preoccupied with such universal concerns, “Kontinental ’25” is very much a film about modern-day Romania. Jude is a savvy chronicler of the country’s decades-long experiment with gonzo capitalism, and the ongoing “transition period” of the post-socialist era — themes he explored to devastating effect in his withering workplace dramedy “Do Not Expect too Much From the End of the World,” a 2023 competition entry in Locarno.
While determined not to downplay the “degrading and horrible” circumstances of the Ceaușescu regime, which ended with Romania’s rough democratic transition in the 1990s, the director returns time and again to the unraveling of the social order that followed in the strongman’s wake — a period that has “created a lot of suffering for … people who were more or less abandoned by the state.”
If anything, the challenges have become more pronounced as the world becomes more unhinged — or, perhaps, as it catches up to the lunatic brilliance of Radu Jude. Last November, Romania elected a far-right, pro-Russian candidate to be its next president, only to have the results annulled by a constitutional court over accusations of Kremlin interference. Just last week, the country’s outgoing president resigned, rather than face impeachment by hard-right parliamentary parties.
Though hardly amused by the turmoil, the director can at least appreciate a certain irony in his country’s further rightward tilt. Pointing to the recent return to the White House of Donald Trump, Jude notes that for many years in Romania, “the U.S.A. was always shown to us (sometimes with a certain superiority) as a great model to follow, as a great democracy we should not only respect but imitate,” he says. “So nowadays we are imitating this great democracy who just elected a bunch of loony fascists to rule the world.”
It’s a lot to take in. Not for nothing does Orsolya seem trapped in a web of words throughout “Kontinental ’25” — spurred to inaction, as it were, by the tragedy in which she played no small part. “In a way, her moral crisis is an easy way out,” Jude says. “But I must admit that, concerning these issues, I am as lost as she is. And the film tries to capture this confusion — it is its main theme, in a way.”
“Kontinental ’25” offers a knowing nod to Roberto Rossellini’s “Europe ’51,” a post-war drama that likewise followed “a woman consumed by guilt, searching for redemption,” according to Jude. But the Romanian’s take, set in the Transylvanian boom town of Cluj, is “less metaphysically tragic and more grounded in a very contemporary blend of comedy and drama” — a combustible mix he describes as “a caricature of sorts of Rossellini.”
The film is an exercise, too, in a simplicity that would have done the Italian neorealists proud. Shot on an iPhone, “Kontinental ’25” hearkens back to what Rossellini referred to as a “poverty of means,” shooting in 10 days without lighting or grip equipment, relying solely on dialogue and natural settings — a process Jude describes as “liberating.”
The director is currently in post-production on his anticipated “Dracula” movie, which he hopes will be “the total opposite” of his Golden Bear contender. “If ‘Kontinental ’25’ is my answer to Roberto Rossellini,” he says, “let’s say that ‘Dracula’ is my love letter to Ed Wood.”
