Malmkrog | Review

Ollie Ollie Oligarchy: Puiu Weighs the World That Was in Long Form

For what stands as his sixth narrative feature, Malmkrog, Romanian New Wave auteur Cristi Puiu returns to a text he’s obviously fascinated by, the 1900 philosophical publication War, Progress, and the End of History: Three Conversations Including a Short Story of the Anti-Christ by Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, whose works influenced the generation after him more than his own (like Sergei Bulgakov or Lev Shestov). Puiu had mounted an experimental workshop in 2013 which became the film Three Exercises of Interpretation, but this time around, he mounts a loose period piece adaptation of the text, shifting the action to Transylvania (the title is the German language name for the city of Malancrav, an incredibly isolated village with one of the country’s most famously fortified churches) and the language to French with a running time of nearly three-and-a-half-hours.

For those familiar with Puiu when he’s on a dialogue heavy kick (such as his last feature, 2016’s Sieranevada), the exchange of lofty ideals betwixt a quintet of impassioned but elitist members from Russia’s ruling class has the tendency to overwhelm. While those appreciative of international art-house inclinations will surely find many facets of these discussions fascinating, Puiu has delivered a film which may be as alienating with language as his 2010 title Aurora was with silence.

It’s Christmas in Transylvania, and a handful of guests have arrived, assumedly to celebrate the holiday with wealthy landowner Nikolai (Frederic Schulz-Richard) at his palatial estate in Malmkrog. Along with his spouse, a young countess, a general and his wife (plus an ailing colonel tended upon in a guest room), they discuss through six delineated chapters, often heatedly, the values of religion, war, the continual struggles of good vs. evil and the Antichrist.

Impressively performed considered the tone and subject matter, Puiu seems to be visually playing with Tolstoian expectations just as Solovyov’s text toys with the famed Russian scribe’s abstract morality which was of significant cultural significance to this period. Confined within one palatial estate (which might be a nod to Malmkrog’s own notable structure, the Apafi Mansion), Puiu’s film plays as if it begins in the same rigid realms of Sergey Bondarchuk’s epic 1966 adaptation of War & Peace if we never get out of the opening moments in that film—in essence, these are five characters who share lunch and dinner and spin their wheels on Solovyov’s antics, which, as one character critiques another, devolves often into syllogism. Another comments “philosophy bewilders the mind.”

Truer words might not be spoken in Puiu’s bravura tackling of such ambitious ideations in cinematic form. Tudur Panduru (who lensed Cristian Mungiu’s 2016 title Graduation) hones our focus in static shots allowing for long-winded conversations to unwind into their inevitable dissolution, segues thankfully offered by its characters’ need for physical sustenance. We’re stuck so long in the same space with them, a recurring visual option is our view of the back of their heads whilst one character unloads their viewpoint, the others stuck, waiting to retort or expand.

Puiu makes several notable changes from Solovyov’s text, beginning with the five representatives jabbering away, which originally included a Lady, a Prince, a General, a Politician and a man named Mr. Z (who stood in for the author himself). Puiu changes this to three women and two men (and locks up a sick colonel in the eaves), which changes the dynamic of several swaths of dialogue lifted literally from the text. In particular, the three women of Malmkrog (Agathe Bosch, Marina Palii, and particularly Diana Sakalauskaite) channel the correct intense fluctuations of impassioned emotion elicited by those of the elitist, privileged class whilst making concessions and inviting (sometimes at least) repudiations of their eloquent, verbose viewpoints.

The two upper class men, Edouard and Nikolai, appear as fragile, prickly, and unforgivingly pretentious, which makes most of their extensive monologues a bit more laborious to withstand. A sole chapter dedicated to Istvan (Istvan Teglas), head of the household staff, is a departure in tone from the affable commiserations of the landowner and his friends, reflecting the abusive hierarchy within the working classes. In segment three, dedicated to Edouard, Puiu ends on a marked note of departure, and akin to Fassbinder’s surreal last segment of his 1980 Berlin Alexanderplatz, anticipates the violence of the future, in this cases the istances which would spark the onset of WWI (plus the death of Tsar Nicholas the II and his family), nearly two decades after Solovyov’s text was written.

The conversations unfolding within Malmkrog posit heavier human dilemmas and ask more questions than the perspectives of these elitists can ever attempt to answer, despite some of these centuries old debates remaining prescient as ever. Does progress aim to eliminate death or does cultural progress mean civilization will merely run itself over an inevitable cliff? Is war an unavoidable evil and how should cultural viewpoints be administered concerning its conditions? If one can argue the pros and cons of a ‘good war’ vs. a ‘bad peace,’ who is rightly responsible for defining the shift into or away from either troubling cultural situation? Perhaps the only real truth one can glean, and what it’s characters finally come to in the closing moments, is the devil (or evil, rather) is an encroaching fog in an increasingly overconnected world, distorting realities and disrupting modes of (meaningful) communication.

Reviewed on February 21st at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival – Encounters Program – 200 Mins.

★★★/☆☆☆☆☆