Six years after he won the Palm d'Or for his gripping, painful illegal abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, director Cristian Mungiu is back and still leading the new wave of Romanian cinema. While all of his films are rooted in reality, Mungiu's latest Beyond the Hills is basically a fictionalized account of a true event involving the death of a young woman at an Orthodox monastery after her friend comes to visit. The film, another intense slow burn like Mungiu's previous work, takes a hard look at how unbreakable, rigid faith can test the limits of love and loyalty.
I had a chance to speak with Mungiu about the film, recently honored by Cannes with the Best Screenplay award and Best Actress for stars Cristina Flutur and Cosmina Stratan.
When did you hear about the real life exorcism that sparked this story? And what was it about that which captured your imagination?
CM: The incident happened in June 2005 and immediately all the Romanian newspapers and televisions started relating and debating it and soon the European press also became aware. In this rush to write about the incident, very few people really tried to document themselves about what really happened. Tatiana Niculescu Bran was one of the journalists that recreated the order of events for BBC – and later she wrote a couple of fact-based books about that incident. Pascal Bruckner, the well known French writer, came to Romania supposedly to document this for Roman Polanski and in the years to follow Romanian several Romanian directors were interested by the subject. I was attracted by the complexity of the incident, by the multiple layers it brought in focus: for me it spoke about education, religion, poverty, superstitions, ignorance, the relativity of good and evil, the malfunction of social institutions, about free will and indifference in the modern society.
Just like 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, Beyond the Hills deals with a female friendship put to the ultimate test. What is it about that dynamic that attracts you?
CM: In the core of both films there are important personal choices that we need to make in life – freedom, compromise, relationship to God, social implication and several others – so the female friendship is just one of the possible themes of the films amongst many others. When I decided to write Beyond the Hills, I noticed that there are going to be a couple of women as main characters; I wasn’t really happy about it as I wanted to do something if possible different from 432 – but for me there were as well a lot of substantial differences regarding essential structural components of the story: Beyond the Hills is happening nowadays and not during the communist times, the amount of filmic time was expanded from the classical 24 hours to several days, the quantity of narrated facts and side stories was way greater – and these differences mattered for me much more in the end than the easy noticeable resemblance of the triangle ‘two women, one man’.
In both films, we see the impact being poor or of lesser means can have when dealing with a major medical issue. Do you see it as one of your mission statements as a director to highlight social inequalities wherever they may be?
CM: I believe that in both films the essential issues are ethical while the medical issue is more a circumstance. What concerns me more than social inequalities is the moral dilemma of doing good by force when you suspect that the other became incapable of making his own decisions: when can you be sure that you’re not being abusive – even if you act out of good will? This said, it’s true that in society richer people stand better chances – but it was always like this.
I think anyone who actually sits down and watches the film will see that neither Romania or the Orthodox church are disparaged in any way, but there were still some unhappy about it. What's your reaction to some of the outcry from members of the Orthodox church?
CM: Of course, this incident is not something to be proud – neither for the Church, nor for the Romanians in general – but the film doesn’t blame anybody in particular. You can’t, nevertheless, deny that such things can occur in places where there are conditions for them to occur – and from this perspective, we all have a responsibility – from being tolerant with superstitious practices, for example, to being socially non-reactive or to very indulgent with incompetence and abuses. My point is that if we don’t like how we look when we watch ourselves in the mirror, we should change ourselves, not blame the mirror.
One thing I've really admired is the evolution of your work from film to film. What are some of the things you've learned from Occident to now?
CM: I gained a lot of experience and it’s easier for me to get what I want from the actors and crew on the set – but I also lost a lot of innocence – and a lot of freedom together with it.
Cosmina Stratan and Cristina Flutur were both incredible in the film, as evidenced by their wins at Cannes. What was it that you saw in them that they were perfect to play such wonderfully complex characters?
CM: I read a lot with actors in casting before deciding who matches the closest the characters in the screenplay – so at the end I can pretty much tell who would be the best for the part. I included a sample from the casting sessions of Cosmina and Cristina as bonuses of the Romanian DVD – and it’s easy to notice that what they do is outstanding in terms of emotion, precision, intuition and convincingness.
Beyond the Hills is in theaters now.
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