NYFF: "Malmkrog"
Sunday, September 20, 2020 at 9:00PM by Jason Adams
The urge to wander off into our own personal worlds has become, presently, understandable. Many of us have been literally forced into it in 2020, covering our faces and taping up our windows, our only human interaction through Zoom. How many of us have watched pixelated people blow out their birthday candles from their corner of the Brady Bunch squares on our laptop screens? But I mean more than physical isolation here -- I mean it feels as if in some ways our imaginations are having a renaissance; in the absence of open spaces and fresh air at the least our brains have been given a moment to breathe. It's in some ways terrifying and in others liberating, but there seem to be ways of embracing this shitty moment that aren't shit in themselves.
Reality dictates that Cristi Puiu's new film Malmkrog, named after the region in Romania where it is supposed to be set, must have been filmed before right now. But it feels of right now, right this minute, at least in the way of its isolated white-windowed impenetrability...
Malmkrog feels like stepping into another person's cloistered brain. It felt to me like listening to someone else's thoughts, their inner monologue -- fractured, as we all are, and often at war with itself; debating ideas from every angle. Ideas about philosophy and war and religion, good and evil, that I personally have never this much considered, at least not in the minute detail with which these folks find themselves excavating. It was, as that probably sounds, by turns exasperating and thrilling, with a lot of white noise in between.
The plot, if it can be called that, finds five aristocratic or at least aristocrat-adjacent people spending the day in a snowbound Transylvanian manor waiting for meals to be served, eating those meals, and then waiting for the next meal, while baton-like they ruminate one after the other on the aforementioned subjects. Everyone is exquisitely framed, costumed, and photographed, turning by degrees in the frame against well-appointed bookshelves and candelabras, making small dramas out of one's relation to another, the wall, and the camera, like a Merchant / Ivory film shot by Fassbinder.
There are servants around -- one even gets their own titular chapter. We find out at one point is is Christmas Eve, which seems to refract all of these moral and religious conundrums through a new prism, but then later we begin to consider it might have always been and always will be Christmas Eve in this purgatorial place -- time telescopes and loses meaning. What fresh Buñuelian Hell is this?
The film is long, over three hours, and one's attention will swell and eddy with its tides, which come and go, come and go. There does thrum behind everything, even just blase chatter in what I'm told is ill-spoken French, a dark tension -- we get lost in reveries of babies cannibalized on battlefields for instance, and a thrilling action scene consists of a woman suddenly passing out at one point! My heart burst with cinema's dramatic possibilities, now that I remembered such things possible! Snark aside everything seems on a precipice. And if the precipice does come, hell, they will just tilt their teacup and carry on talking.
More than once watching Malmkrog I thought of Albert Serra's punishing Liberté that played last year's NYFF, also a pitch-black and furious satire of noblesse oblige just with way more on-screen pissing, which was also a movie I gaped in deeply exhausted awe at for mere audacity, sheer gumption. Repelled and off-put, sure, but one that in its same way felt like a crystalline-refined induction unto another person's unfamiliar head-space -- this, you think, is a movie a director had to make, for the precise audience of themselves, with not a lot of concern in the making of just who'll follow. Because somebody, they trust, will follow, and that somebody won't soon forget. That somebody, even if it's just themselves, is enough.
Cristi Puiu, NYFF, Reviews, Romania
Reader Comments (3)
I'm not sure whether I want to see the movie, but I loved this review. It's rare that film criticism can be this charming without being an outright pan.
Besides, I'd never thought of combining Dorothy Parker and Buñuel.
I love Cristi Puiu. His movies are very demanding, yes, but they are also exhausting in the best possible meaning of the word. Aurora, Sieranevada and The Death of Mr Lazarescu all have this rare quality of provinding a deep, immersing experience in a very particular world.
Eh, sounds like I can stick to The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, though admittedly, I'm a bigger fan of fellow Romanian Cristian Mungiu, who's made, by my count, at least two masterpieces of naturalistic cinema.
Beyond the Hills, in particular, is a hypnotizing experience. I'm so tired of watching rich people navel-gaze. Like, bone-tired.