Beyond the Hills

A very strong first half becomes something less subtle and less compelling; still a solid film.

From FilmAffinity España at this link, via Wiki. Fair use.

Beyond the Hills (2012). Grade: B-

A few years back, we were touring the Landmark Center in Saint Paul. Because it’s a pretty neat old public building, and it’s a free tour. A lot of old public buildings like courthouses and post offices offer these tours; ask ones near you if they do.

Anyways, we found out that one of the cultural/civic organizations with a home in the Landmark Center is the Heritage Organization of Romanian Americans in Minnesota. (Long title; it’s a complicated country.) We wondered if there were a whole lot of Romanian-Americans in Minnesota; there aren’t! But it’s an interesting thing to learn more about, absolutely. They had a free film festival that year; we saw one and liked it. Very straightforward slice-of-life stuff, without any pushy melodrama; the characters seemed perfectly believable, which is always a plus.

They also had a little exhibit in their small exhibit room, about superstition and religious belief in some rural areas. Some of the superstitions were thowbacks to a pre-Christian era; some were quite silly, others rather nasty. (Things like good omens about your wedding day are enjoyably silly; cursing someone won’t do much harm, although I’d consider it rude).

None of this is meant to suggest that I have any particular insights into Romanian society; I’m certainly very ignorant on the subject. What little I do know is that the country has a long and complex background. Romanians today wrestle with their recent Soviet-era history and the horrific slaughter of Jews and Romani during WWII. The difficulties today of being part of a Europe that frequently swings between no-holds-barred capitalism and a frightening tendency to embrace authoritarian movements of the past. And a culture that’s long been partly secular and partly, deeply spiritual or even superstitious; divides that often are driven by income, cutural heritage, geographic location. In short, it’s a lot like most other countries.

I mention this because it’s part of the understanding I bring to watching a Romanian film — which is NOT necessarily how a Romanian would watch it.

Beyond the Hills is somewhat based on real events in 2005, and two nonfiction books by Tatiana Niculescu. It mostly takes place at an Orthodox Christian convent (rather confusingly called a monastery; it had previously been a monastery). There’s a young woman of about 25, who’s in the process of fully becoming an aescetic nun. She’s visited by her former roommate from an orphanage, who’s been struggling to start a new life in Germany. The former roommate wants the nun to come with her, back to Germany, and get a job on a cruise ship; the two of them used to have a sexual relationship. The nun loves her old friend, and worries about her, and doesn’t want to let her down… but she’s increasingly more committed to her religious calling.

Neither woman’s prospects are anything but bleak. That cruise ship job in Germany is a pretty desperate hope more than a tangible plan. The nun has nowhere else but the monastery where she can imagine having food and shelter. (And the monastery’s a cold place in winter; everyone’s breath is visible indoors.) The orphange won’t take 25-years-olds back, and it’s hinted that some awful abuses happened there. The foster system for former orphanage kids isn’t helpful. The local town seems like it’s half falling apart.

Seeing how the woman returned from Germany is in a tough spot, the monastery lets her stay for a short while. The priest/spiritual leader is sympathetic, but also deeply devoted to making the monastery a haven from most of the corrupt outside world. He thinks even walking into a Catholic church is a grevious sin; he readily hands out penance assignments of saying 1000 rosaries. (In Catholicism, in English, saying one rosary takes at least 10-20 minutes.) A list of sins you’re suggested to consider confessing mentions a litany of disallowed thoughts well before it gets to anything like “don’t swipe your sister’s socks.”

As her chances of getting to Germany grow dimmer, and her chances of rekindling the old flame seem impossible, the young visitor starts to have a breakdown. She’s briefly hospitalized; the doctor believes that resting at the monastery with proper medication would be better for her. But when she returns, her behavior is erratic… and the other nuns start worrying that they’re seeing signs. Ill omens.

At this point, I was pretty convinced I knew where the story would be going. That the signs and omens would be more frequent, and the monastery’s response to them more superstitious and drastic. I was kinda of right, barely. The film actually goes in a harsher, tenser direction than I’d guessed.

Up until then — about the halfway point in a 2 1/2 hour movie — the pacing is a steady buildup. The monastery scenes are quiet, voices lowered, with sounds of a small farm’s animals in the background. (So much so that when you hear the occasional modernity like an overhead jet, it’s a little startling.) Even the hospital scenes and town scenes are, mostly, low-key.

But when things go haywire at the monastery, the pacing and camerawork get much more rushed and jittery. It starts to become a very different film; from a slow one focused on rural religious life to something almost out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Even if you were having an actute mental health crisis, you would panic if well-meaning people responded to it in this way.

I didn’t enjoy this shift in style and tone. I understand why director Cristian Mungiu is doing it; it’s to give a harried urgency to what’s happening. But to me it felt forced. I watched everyone panicking and the camera swerving around and thought “um, they’re playing panicky reasonably well.” I’ve seen too many scenes staged and filmed in this way to believe in them.

And, what’s worse, Mood Snow. Whenever things get really dire, there’s a blizzard. That could be Mungiu’s way of showing how the elements feel to the priest and nuns like God’s bitter fury. Or it could just be mood snow. (It is filmed rather beautifully by cinematographer Oleg Mulu; one quick glimpse of a reddened sun glowing through snowy clouds was a stunner.)

It seems as though the film stays pretty close to the real story, but there are some things left out — things that a Romanian audience might have already known about. The priest, shown here as a middle-aged man (actor Valeriu Andriuta was born in 1967), was actually 29 when this happened. The monastery is one of hundreds all over Romania, mostly funded by local Chamber of Commerce sorts. Frequently these are places that rural residents turn to hoping for medical miracles; the partially privatized health care system appears to be a mess, as partially privatized services almost always are.

The details of what happened are shown, although they aren’t quite resolved; what finally occurred (and what several people went to jail for) may have been entirely the monastery’s fault, partially their fault, or the fault of others who responded poorly to the crisis. Mungiu doesn’t give us a definitive answer; I’m fine with that.

But, again, I question some of the filming choices in these later scenes. We go from the chaos of the crisis to long, steady shots, with faces expressing — I’m not always sure what. Guilt? Confusion? Hopeless futility? It isn’t clear.

The Criterion booklet’s essay, by Romanian film scholar Doru Pop, says that the film depicts “a land where time has stopped, where people exist in the backwaters of history.” That’s quite possibly the case in some, or much of Romania; I don’t know. Originally, watching a scene here where city officals idly chat about gossip and superstitious curses, I saw it as no more than the sort of silly type of thing that might make someone believe in throwing salt over their shoulder to avoid bad luck. But maybe the situation’s worse than that. Certainly, in America, a huge number of people fervently believe in bizarre theories they’ve been force-fed by talk radio or the internet.

In any case, this is a well-made film, especially in the first half; with strong performances by Andriuta, by Cristina Flutur and Cosmina Stratan as the former lovers, by Dana Tapalaga as the Mother Superior. But for me, it went from fascinating to something less mysterious, more blatant. I’ll still be keeping an eye out for Romanian films, though! They’ve certainly got a lot to say.