Cristian Mungiu has returned with this dour, gloomy psychodrama of central European xenophobia: a Romanian-Brexity hostility which has taken up residence in the brains of people in a multi-ethnic region of Transylvania. They are people who can’t decide which racial identity among their neighbours they dislike the most, or how much to dislike the EU from which so much financial help still comes, but whose richer countries are very racist indeed towards them. For all that it is a little contrived and underpowered sometimes, RMN is an intriguing essay on a kind of crisis in the racist mindset: when and how do you suppress your dislike of one kind of people to make common cause with them against some other kind?
The setting is a village where Romanians, ethnic Hungarians and German-speakers have lived together reasonably calmly for 30 years. Matthias (Marin Grigore) is hatchet-faced guy who has had to abandon his job in a German slaughterhouse after assaulting the racist foreman who had called him a “lazy gipsy”. Now back in his home town and unemployed, Matthias is coldly received by his wife Ana (Macrina Bârlădeanu) because he is clearly still having an affair with another woman, the rather stylish Hungarian Csilla (Judith State), who plays the cello and manages a modern hi-tech bakery with the help of EU grants. The town’s quarrelling people are coming together to express their bigoted loathing of the Sri Lankans Csilla has hired – because no locals responded to the job ads. (Like Matthias, of course, the menfolk are more interested in the bigger pay-packets to be had in Germany, among people who look down on them.) Meanwhile, Matthias’s ailing father is very sick and has had to have an MRI scan (in Romanian a “rezonanță magnetică nucleară”, or RMN).
