Malmkrog

In his most formally audacious film since THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU, Cristi Puiu sets the stage for the chaos and cruelty of the 20th century with a slowly simmering 19th-century battle of wits. The setting is a placid one: a landowner and his guests entertain themselves with the rituals of polite debate about the issues of the day. Yet these dialogues probe fundamental questions of social values, religion, national identity, and personal conduct. The guests – a young countess, a general and his wife, and a politician – display clashing levels of sincerity and cynicism, while the servants provide a shadow play of labor and power dynamics.
Dividing the film into six chapters, Puiu shoots the actors with a kind of perverse naturalism: deeply faithful to the ordinary nature of this get-together for the participants, but subtly warped by a range of deviations from traditional dramatic focus, with an absolute freedom reminiscent of Manoel de Oliveira. At the center of it all lies a violent upheaval that threatens to upend our understanding of the entire film, which freely reworks Vladimir Solovyov’s 1899 Platonic treatise “Three Conversations About War, Progress, and the End of History”. (Nicolas Rapold)

Cristi Puiu: STUFF AND DOUGH (2001), THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU (2005), AURORA (2010), TROIS EXERCICES D’INTERPRÉTATION (2013), LES PONTS DE SARAJEVO (2014, Episode), SIERANEVADA (2016)