Jude will soon do just that. Ion has been squatting in the basement of an apartment building, which is set to be levelled to make way for a luxury hotel called the Kontinental Boutique. Enter Orsolya, who shows up at the door with some gendarmes and an official eviction notice and gives Ion twenty minutes to quit the premises. Throughout the process, Orsolya makes a great show of her reasonableness and decency. She’s provided Ion with many notices and extensions already; she’s thoughtfully arranged transportation for his things; she’d be glad to put him in touch with her priest. Ion responds with the only reasonable gesture he can muster: left alone to pack up his things, he twists a length of wire around his neck and hangs himself from a radiator. The evictors return and try to save him, but they’re too late, and Orsolya, like Bergman’s Irene before her, finds herself utterly unmoored. Unlike Irene, though, she proceeds to hurl herself into a crisis that is ultimately more self-serving than soul-searching. She sends her husband and kids off on a pre-planned Greek holiday, choosing instead to stick around Cluj for a good, long mope.
Much of “Kontinental ’25” unfolds as a series of one-on-one conversations, each filmed in a lengthy single take, with the two speakers side by side in the frame. These sustained durations build a sense of unforced naturalism but also a steadily pulsing tension; the talk can be at once pointed and meandering, and Jude throws in at least two references to Bertolt Brecht, just in case we were not yet in a sufficiently analytical or argumentative frame of mind. Orsolya has an unpleasant visit with her mother (Annamária Biluska); seeks spiritual counsel from the aforementioned priest, Father Șerban (Șerban Pavlu); and tells anyone and everyone she meets about the horror of Ion’s death—invariably stressing, with a pious, preëmptive defensiveness, that, although she isn’t legally responsible for what happened, she feels morally burdened all the same. Contrast her behavior with that of Rossellini’s Irene, who bravely turned her torments outward, saving a sick child, helping a mother find a job, and comforting a sex worker in her final hours. The only troubled brow that Orsolya seems interested in soothing is her own.
The Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, obvious heirs to the neorealist tradition of Rossellini, made their own stealth homage to “Europe ’51” some years ago. “The Unknown Girl,” their drama from 2017, follows a young doctor, Jenny, who ignores an after-hours visit from an African woman who later turns up dead—a moral and professional failing that she spends the rest of the movie attempting to make amends for. In that film and others, the Dardennes conduct an investigation that is at once procedural and spiritual in nature, and they pursue it to an invariably bracing conclusion: acts of conscience, great and small, matter immensely—even, or especially, in a world that seems to have no use for them. Jude, in his own scabrously funny way, is no less rigorous or searching a moralist than the Dardennes, even if he spikes his realism with absurdism and takes a rather more dubious view of redemption.
His instincts, like his techniques, are relentlessly up-to-the-minute; Orsolya is hounded by not only her guilty conscience but also the demons of social media. “Kontinental ’25” isn’t as TikTok-saturated as “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World” (though that movie’s virtuoso star, Ilinca Manolache, does pop up briefly as one of Orsolya’s colleagues), but it evinces an acute awareness of how the internet has reduced both penitence and outrage to largely performative states. There’s also the fact that Orsolya is Hungarian, and that Ion, years before he became destitute, was a medal-winning Romanian athlete—all of which has spurred online trolls into bursts of racist, misogynist invective: “I’d beat you to a pulp, you filthy Hungarian bitch” is a typical response. As Orsolya’s friend Dorina (Oana Mardare) tartly claims, Romania “stole” Transylvania from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, and Cluj itself remains profoundly Hungarian—which explains those postcard-pretty vistas to begin with. “Doesn’t this look like Vienna or Budapest?” Dorina points out. “Does this look like any of the southern Romanian towns?”