Nestled in a valley beneath the Apuseni mountain range in the Western Carpathians is a rustic commune called Întregalde. Containing only a few hundred residents whose ages average around 60, scattered across some 85 square kilometers of temperate slopes and a few narrow roads that become virtually impassable in winter, Întregalde takes on the status of metonym in the Romanian writer-director Radu Muntean's new film of the same name.
The film, co-written by Muntean and frequent collaborators Alexandru Baciu and Razvan Radulescu, depicts the misadventure of a trio of humanitarian aid volunteers - Maria (Maria Popistasu), Ilinca (Ilona Brezoianu), and Dan (Alex Bogdan) - as they deliver relief packages to the various villages all along the inscrutable byways of the Apuseni. The relief organization first assembles in a nearby town, apportions donated supplies, and splits off into separate teams that take different routes throughout the county. Maria initially sets off with a different pair of volunteers, a married couple, but decides to jump ship and join Ilinca and Dan when she grows uncomfortable with the former's constant debating and sniping at one another, particularly over the question of whether or not their work does any good. The husband, who was proud to reunite and take a picture with a family to whose daughter he had presented an electronic tablet on their previous trip, insists that they sincerely appreciated the assistance with their physical necessities, as well as the emotional relief of human contact. His wife disagrees, concluding that those who receive the relief are often just being polite to the strangers at their door, and further observes that the little girl in question was actually rather melancholy. Though their first meeting had resulted in her getting a fancy new toy, this had created unrealistic expectations that, along with the sudden and prolonged isolation that followed, actually hurt her in the long term. The husband ruefully jokes that his wife is effectively comparing him to a deadbeat father.
Maria is glad to be out of the situation, but the seed of cynicism is planted for her own emotional journey, as well as that of the spectator. The "relief," once we actually get a look at it, seems largely insubstantial, at least as far as proper nutrition is concerned. There also seems to be some concern with who actually gets the relief and who does not, the suggestion being that the town mayor administering the relief effort is conveniently sending teams to all of his cousins instead of those who are most in need. One of Maria, Ilinca, and Dan's ports of call proves to be a small hut where an old woman lives entirely on her own. After they leave, Muntean lingers on the confused experience of this character as she crawls out of bed, finds that she is too old and weak to untie the relief bundle, and is then forced to drag this heavy thing across the floor all by herself.
Întregalde is a subtle satire of the ways in which an ascendant generation of comfortable, cosmopolitan young people can leverage often meaningless spectacles of charity as an excuse for adventure, as a distraction from the boredom and dysfunction of their private lives, or to simply assure themselves that they are, at heart, better people than they actually are. Maria, Ilinca, and Dan eventually come upon a senile old man named Kente, played by Luca Sabin, a non-professional actor. Kente is just ambling along the muddy mountain roads, attempting to reach a local sawmill for an appointment with a friend. The would-be humanitarians attempt to help him along his way, but only end up running aground of the narrow, winding, claylike paths that even their off-road vehicles were simply not designed to traverse. In fact, they run aground twice. The second time strands them just as the sun is going down and the implacable cold of night is setting in. As you might expect, these less than ideal circumstances test the camaraderie of our heroes, as well as their ostensive commitment to the moral resolve assumed by their charitable mission. When the old man simply dotters off into the hills, Maria insists that they go after him, a proposition that Dan viciously rejects. Suddenly, it seems, there's just no helping some people, and nature must take its course after all.
If this all sounds very severe, then I accidentally buried the lead. Întregalde is a satiric film, sure, but it's certainly not particularly intense or judgmental in the sense that we might often assume a satire to be, especially in the American context. Muntean isn't mounting the Romanian equivalent of Eli Roth's Green Inferno or anything; he isn't just throwing caricatures of liberal hipsters and poverty tourists to the wolves and turning the screws to watch them suffer. Just as the sense of humor of the film is rather dry, so too is the sense of peril faced by the characters presented in pragmatic, rather than histrionic or maudlin terms. A credible sense of danger persists throughout the story, but this is no survival thriller. Indeed, one of the more beguiling aspects of Întregalde is that its dramatic focus really does seem to be the heightened degree to which the characters react in the moment, interpersonal tensions escalating far above the plateau of their situation. We observe this all with an eerie objectivity, Muntean and cinematographer Tudor Vladimir Panduru often filming entire scenes in one long steady shot. The characters are stuck, lost, and cold, but that's about it. They very narrowly make things much worse for themselves by just getting over-excited, committing cardinal sins like striking off on their own when they should stick to one spot and stay together. But even then, Muntean portrays his satirical subjects as competent, or at least up to the task. There is an apparent gravity to what the story becomes about, particularly Maria's personal desperation to see Kente taken care of. But even this is approached with a paradoxical lightness that is so matter-of-fact and fleeting. This doesn't necessarily register on immediate viewing, but there's an enigmatic quality to the film that clings to the back of your mind. There's more going on here than a dry, witty observation of human cynicism framed through the rationale of charity.
Muntean comes from the ranks of a generation of Romanian filmmakers who came of age during the country's tumultuous, revolutionary transition from authoritarian communism to liberal democracy and capitalism. While his first feature film, The Rage, was reflective of the prevalent stylism that dominated international and arthouse cinema in the '90s - epitomized by Quentin Tarantino in the United States, Luc Besson in France, Wong Kar-wai in Hong Kong, and Danny Boyle in the United Kingdom - his 2006 follow-up, The Paper Will Be Blue (also co-written by Baciu and Radulescu), was seen as part of the flourishing of a categorical rejection of formal hegemony and escapism in Romanian national cinema, dubbed by Western observers to be a "Romanian New Wave." Whereas The Rage was a poppy, indulgent crime story that vacillated between juvenile action, awkward humor, and whimsical romance, coming off as nothing short of an oriental contemporary to Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels or Danny Boyle's A Life Less Ordinary, The Paper Will Be Blue was a muted, darkly comic anecdote set during the civil unrest of the Romanian Revolution, and was shot with a veritably caustic minimalism. Frustrated by both the sense of inauthenticity of Romanian cinema as it developed under communism, as well as by the globe-bestriding dominance of Western consumer culture, Muntean has continued, as he said in a 2015 interview, "to make more straightfoward and honest films," carrying on with the new wave style for the last decade, albeit concentrated on much more melodramatic, as opposed to historical or polemical subjects.
With a film such as Întregalde, where its satire of the social and personal pretenses of charity and generosity seem so apparently general, coming out of a new context in which the social realism that defined the supposed "new wave" in Romania has become more of a status quo, its questions and commentary remain all but inextricable from a certain specificity of national, cultural, and historical preoccupation. And a similar point could very well be made about The Rage. Though ostensibly so much like its Western counterparts, there is little doubt that even the patron saint of aestheticized violence Quentin Tarantino would never consider ending, say, True Romance, as Muntean chooses to end The Rage: with a crime lord's teenage son getting stabbed in the neck and murdered, with a pair of criminal lovers on the lam, and with the hero brutally beating his ingénue's attempted rapist to death over the course of a prolonged single take from afar before they drag his dead body into the grass and drive off in his van as the credits roll. Even while spinning his wheels in the claylike muck of Western pop art influence, searching for a unique artistic voice, Muntean's vision could not help but reflect a uniquely troubled despondence and lack of patience for puppy love stories and pulp fiction.
It's difficult to define, but there's just something about Întregalde, even without anything remotely so morbid happening in it, that maintains a vivid and disturbing energy. There are nerves that we in the U.S. aren't so used to having touched, and which are not touched by our popular cinema because there is nothing comparable to which to connect it. (It's not unlike how so many of our action-oriented thrillers are completely put to shame by Asghar Farhadi's nail-biting moral parable A Hero.) In America, the political is systematically alienated from the personal. It's not that there aren't aspects of Întregalde that can touch upon universal aspects of American and Romanian experience. It's that the social realism of Întregalde, by design, translates into a kind ephemeral lightness that too often wisps by our hardened hearts. Our "straightforward and honest" stories are saturated in Tyler Perry comedies and Hallmark Christmas movies. Their outlook on supposedly simple melodramatic themes is addressed with the same solipsism and grandiosity of purpose as Wonder Woman swooping in to rescue a child from a rocket strike. How does a movie like Întregalde, a film all about how we use spectacles of altruism and generosity to placate our own cynical motives, even register to a society so possessively invested in seeing itself as the whole world's good guy?
I couldn't help but think of Martin McDonagh's In Bruges while watching Întregalde. Whereas the gangster characters of McDonagh's movie characterize the scenic Belgian city of the title as being "like a fairy tale," I came to see the world portrayed in Muntean's film as the Janus face of that concept. This is the real fairy tale world, the one far away from the princess castles where brave heroes rest their laurels. This is the realm from which Hansel and Gretel and the Big Bad Wolf sprang, allegories of a human existence rooted in the cycle of indomitable nature. This is the world in which old madmen still wonder the woods, following the ghostly voices of lost friends. And this is just as much, if not more so, the circumstantial focus of Muntean's film, flexible in how it can be translated to foreign observers, and yet still so evidently personal, germane to a specific national experience. Though the people of Întregalde may have telephones, electricity, and even modern cars, they still more or less eke out an existence that isn't much different than that of their ancestors in centuries past - before capitalism, before communism, before revolution. And, now, true to life, Întregalde is rapidly becoming a land of only ancestors. The reason the population is so aged is because the young people have flown away. The thrust of modernity has pulled waves of generations away from the earth, away from the villages, away from an entire aspect of collective life. What remains is gradually becoming a living history, an allegory unto itself, only to be beheld and retold like fairy tales to generations now almost thoroughly alienated from the original meaning. Hence, "Întregalde" becomes metonymic. The town becomes the metaphorical capital of a decades-long trend of deep, pervasive national and cultural change; of a withering old world being left behind.
The complementary American story of the young, urban, professional-class individual venturing into the rustic hollers is almost always a gruesome horror story or patronizing fantasy about finding one's "true self" away from the hustle and bustle of new world values. We are obsessed with notions of stark, intractable divides, and the bloody conflicts that result. Either that, or we are obsessed by perceived infractions of one's essential nature, demanding coded punishment. Întregalde, of course, is about neither of these things. The same sort of story, stripped of its grandiose obsessions, becomes about how such apparently simple things - like a volunteer relief trip, or an accident on an unfamiliar road - can bring one suddenly into confrontation with a profound, almost inexpressible sadness. This sadness is not concerned with our moral nature, but rather with the abject nature of human beings. It is not concerned with the loss of "traditional values," but rather with the loss of people. It is not a sadness born of the the fear of change, but rather a sadness that comes with taking in the sheer scope of time itself, and how it ultimately belittles us all.
That's the deft trickery of Întregalde. Once invested in the conflict and drama of the story, growing used to the dry humor of it all, what we are left with by the climax is that light, perturbing sadness that grows the more one thinks about it.
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