SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Orsolya is a bailiff - that's a court officer - in Cluj, Transylvania in Romania, who serves an eviction order with police on a man who's been sleeping in the boiler room of an apartment building that's been bought by a German hotel firm.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "KONTINENTAL '25")
ESZTER TOMPA: (As Orsolya, speaking in non-English language).
SIMON: "We know you're home," she tells the man when they come to force him out. "You knew we would come today."
(SOUNDBITE OF KNOCKING)
SIMON: Give him 20 minutes to pack his things. But when they return, the man has taken his life, and that sends Orsolya on a midlife crisis journey in the days that follow. "Kontinental '25" is the new film from Radu Jude, the acclaimed Romanian filmmaker, best known for his film "Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World." He joins us from Bucharest. Thanks so much for being with us.
RADU JUDE: Thank you so much for inviting me in a place I admire very much - from afar and actually, not so much from afar, because the grace of the internet, now I can listen to great NPR.
SIMON: Thank you. That's so nice to hear. I gather you read a news report about an incident that was something like this.
JUDE: It was an interview with the bailiff, a lady, like in the film, and she was crying and felt miserable and people around were comforting her. So this 10 seconds became the basis of the film, because I said how interesting and how weird that usually it's the other way around. There's some people around are throwing and accusing the guilty one, and here it was the opposite. She was the only one who considered herself having a problem, and the others not.
SIMON: Help us understand what the city of Cluj is going through. It seems quite picturesque.
JUDE: Yeah. Actually, that was another trigger of making the film. When I discovered because of teaching - I'm teaching in a cinema school there. And I started to discover this city, which is now the fast-growing city from a point of view economy. It's like the Romanian Silicon Valley, and actually, a lot of foreign companies and American companies are having branches or factories or whatever there. The urban development, real estate development is gentrified because of that.
So then it's, of course, the whole history of Transylvania. Romania has Transylvania only started with the end of first world war, and before it belonged to Hungary. It's still like a hot potato between the nationalists from the two states, and there's a big Hungarian minority in Transylvania. And this tension related to the ownership of the land, so to speak, works as a rhyme for our small story.
SIMON: It seems like you always hear dinosaurs roaring in the center of town.
(SOUNDBITE OF DINOSAURS ROARING)
SIMON: We should explain. These are animatronic figures in a park.
JUDE: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's a kind of dino park. What's interesting is that because the film is an independent film, low-budgetly (ph) made, shot on iPhone, 10 days of shooting only, many people say, OK, you made a low-budget film, but you have CGI dinosaurs in a scene. I said, are you crazy? Which CGI dinosaurs? They were there. It's animatronic object. It's a dino park. So and that was a serendipity because it was not a scene conceived in the screenplay, and in the location we stayed, behind the hotel, it was this dino park. So when I saw it, I said, well, I have to use that. I don't know what it signifies or what's the meaning, and I don't think it has only one meaning. But...
SIMON: I was going to ask you.
JUDE: Well, I have my interpretation, but why would I impose it on you and the others?
SIMON: Yeah. What's it like to make an entire movie on an iPhone?
JUDE: Oh, it's great. Technologically speaking, it's very advanced. Nobody took us as a film crew. So we didn't pay any taxes...
SIMON: (Laughter).
JUDE: ...For the city, and nobody had issues with us. Why are you shooting? I don't want to be in the frame or these kind of things. Everybody took us as tourists. And I think the industry of cinema made it a kind of mystical aura around the cinematic act in itself. Like, it's extremely expensive, it's difficult. You cannot do it like this. You cannot do it like that. It's full of rules. And actually, of course, that can be true for certain films, but I think it's less and less the case. So it's a more democratic medium than ever it was.
SIMON: There's a lot going on around the people, and you have many scenes where there are two people talking. We hear the animatronic dinosaurs. We hear the jangle of outdoor electronic music. That's the kind of thing a lot of directors think you have to avoid it.
JUDE: Actually, the things that most of directors want to avoid is not to make the film very specific because they feel it's losing some universality. But I believe if there's such a characteristic, such a quality, it can be better achieved through particularity. So whenever there's something specific, either on the level of the sound of the image, of the happenstance, or serendipities or whatever, I try to keep those elements in the film, as I consider that - this is what I like as a viewer. I like when they have the mark of time, when they are like a capsule of time when they are made.
SIMON: Orsolya seeks out an old friend. She seeks out her mother. She seeks out a priest. Did they find it hard to understand what's going on with her?
JUDE: I would phrase it differently. I think what's really at stake is two things. Because this woman, after creating partly a suicide, starts questioning that and feeling guilty, etc., etc. There's two things that happens. First of all, the fact that she's trying to play soccer on American football field, somehow. She's having a moral issues on a field which is mostly a field of politics, of economic - not only of ethics. That's one thing.
The other is that it's sometimes impossible to see or to think that isn't this character making a show of her own humanity. Isn't it a bit like people who on social media are virtue signaling - posting everyday things about this or about that and feeling somehow superior because they feel they care while the others don't. Even me as a director and writer of the film, I cannot answer honestly, is she having a real moral crisis, or is she pretending to have a real moral crisis or a bit of both?
SIMON: We see Orsolya driving around a lot. Is that a signal?
JUDE: I think it's not necessarily a signal or something to have a meaning, other than the fact that the big cities in Romania, especially Bucharest, but also Cluj and others - the public transportation, especially with peripherical (ph) areas, is not functioning very well, and that's why people need to resort to cars.
SIMON: See, I've got to tell you. I (laughter) saw Orsolya driving around a lot, and I thought, ah, that's a sign that she's searching for something. And now I ask you about it, and you say, it's just a sign that the town doesn't have good public transit (laughter).
JUDE: Yeah. But, you know, I think - if I can recommend a book, I would recommend a great book by Umberto Eco, which is called "The Limits Of Interpretation." Because in an interpretation process, it doesn't matter which my intention or which was the reason of something that appears in a work of narrative or a work of art or whatever. So I really think that your interpretation is very good BECAUSE I explain you what was the reason of having this, but the symbolistic of it or the hermeneutics of it belongs to you, and I don't think it's wrong.
SIMON: Radu Jude - his new film "Kontinental '25." Thank you so much for being with us.
JUDE: Thank you very much.
SIMON: And if you or someone you know is in crisis, please remember you can call text or speak with a Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988.
(SOUNDBITE OF PIERRE-LAURENT AIMARD'S "MUSICA RICERCATA: NO. 7, CANTABILE, MOLTA LEGATO") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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