By Rob White
Restricted view of Alina’s ordeal: still from 'Beyond the Hills', 2012 Mobra Films / Why Not Productions / Les Films du Fleuve / France 3 Cinéman / Mandragora Movies. Courtesy of Artificial Eye.
It’s six years since Cristian Mungiu won the Cannes Palme d’Or for his painful and pared-down drama about an illegal abortion, ‘4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days’ drawing international attention to what was inevitably called the New Wave of Romanian cinema. Accepting the award, the director explained that these films ‘come from reality, not from other films’.
As with any realism, there’s nothing haphazard involved; it takes discipline to successfully convey the impression of unfiltered reality. In his follow-up feature, Beyond the Hills (2012) – which is released in the UK on 15 March – he continues to abide by rules. Aesthetically the most notable of these is that there’s only one shot per scene. No editing modifies the sense of cinematic space or guides the viewer’s perception of emotional dynamics. This restriction often gives scenes in Beyond the Hills an enclosed painterly quality of separation. At other times, especially when Mungiu keeps an incident off-screen, the effect is more inclusive because both audience and characters have restricted perception. It’s hard to say whether what’s involved is realism conducive to empathy, if what’s meant by that word is a heartening sense of togetherness. Given that Mungiu persistently conveys the disheartening experience of shared powerlessness, it’s more of an abject realism.
Beyond the Hills is set mainly in a conservative monastery in Moldova, in the desolate east of Romania, occupied by a group of nuns obedient to a charismatic priest (Valeriu Andriuţă). One of them, Voichița, (Cosmina Stratan), is little more than a teenager. When Alina (Cristina Fluturher), her best friend and protector, visits she’s shocked to discover Voichița’s newfound passive devotion. Alina has been working in Germany, but she’s lonely there and wants Voichița to join her. Nothing she says, though, shakes her friend’s piety. Alina asks: ‘Will you stay in this cave your whole life? … Are you afraid of living?’ Voichița answers with a parable of the priest’s: ‘A man traveled the world for years to find life’s meaning, and another man looked out of his front door and found peace and God.’ Exasperated, and then desperate to reclaim her friend’s love, Alina challenges the priest’s authority with calamitous consequences for everybody.
The Priest surrounded by nuns
Despite his own rule-bound practice, Mungiu’s depiction of a religious community living in primitive conditions is only intermittently sympathetic. Narrow-mindedness in the monastery develops almost accidentally into violence. In a remote environment that gives its inhabitants precious little comfort, the nuns huddle together for safety and cherish the priest’s certainties. Orphan Alina, by contrast, has struck out on her own in the mistaken belief that Voichița will join her. Alina’s furiously tenacious and sometimes ugly refusal to accept escape without love is the poignant problem at the heart of Mungiu’s grave and powerful film.
Voichița with the priest and mother superior
Rob White: Can you explain the place of the Orthodox Church in Romania?
Cristian Mungiu: Romania was one of the few countries where, during the Communist times, religion was tolerated. It was never like the Soviet Union: churches continued to exist, priests were paid by the state. You could go to church during the Communist times, unless you were a member of the Party – then it wasn’t recommended. Yet [President] Ceaușescu himself buried his parents in an Orthodox ceremony, because they were simple people finally.
Beyond the Hills is set in more recent times (the events it’s based on occurred in 2005). The Church has consolidated its position in society since the end of Communism. I think we have 20,000 churches for a country of 20,000,000 people, with 4,000 built in the post-Communist period. Eighty-five per cent of Romanians declare themselves to be religious in polls. However, if you were to ask people to define their religion, I think there would be a lot of superstition mixed together with Christian morality.
RW: Is the monastic community in Beyond the Hills almost a kind of cult?
CM: It’s not a cult. They’re a part of the Orthodox Church, but very traditionalist. There’s a sign on the gate of the monastery that’s not translated in the English subtitles, which warns against believers in other cults. It’s an extremist position – believing without doubting in any way. Actually the Orthodox Church has increasingly embraced ecumenism, while this priest sticks with the most traditionalist position.
The priest’s traditionalism is expressed when, confronted with Alina’s defiance, he attempts (not without hesitation and caution) an exorcism. He can’t understand her behavior in any way other than as possession by the devil. The priest this character is based on was seen by some as a fanatic, but in the film I think he’s wiser than that label suggests. In particular he insists on the subtle distinction between the manifestation of evil and its cause of evil. There were also some who defended the actual priest because although his exorcism ritual ended with the death of the woman concerned, it did succeed in scaring away the evil from her. She was fine when she died. I thought that was an interesting opinion.
RW: What connections do you see between 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Beyond the Hills?
CM: I don’t see much direct connection apart from the fact that I again thought a lot about my means as a filmmaker. I thought how I was going to make the film and I couldn’t come up with anything smarter or fresher or different in terms of style compared to last time. I didn’t want to make the same kind of film and so the fundamental decision was to do a story that takes place today and not in the Communist society.
If there’s a thematic connection, perhaps it’s in the area of moral dilemmas and situations that aren’t clear, that show you how complicated it is to judge some things. Last time it wasn’t only abortion but also the freedom of decision. Beyond the Hills speaks about how relative good and evil can be. If you watch this situation everything advances in a very logical way, and everybody seems to be trying to help, but finally it doesn’t go well.
Beyond the Hills speaks also to me about the necessity, which comes out towards the end, of making decisions for yourself. What Voichița has to understand at the end is that the sense of guilt is personal and the responsibility that you feel is personal and therefore the decision has to be yours. You can’t share it with anybody else.
RW: Can you speak about the self-imposed restrictions of your filmmaking?
CM: There are several restrictions: just one shot per scene, no music, no editing, the camera always watching from a participant’s perspective. The great difference in terms of structure between this film and the previous one is the amount of time the story covers. It’s a huge difference for me as a filmmaker to represent twenty-four hours in one shot per scene in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days compared to several days in one shot per scene in Beyond the Hills. I wanted to discover if I could use this long-take technique, which I believe to be honest, and still use it for stories that are longer and more complex. I’m still not totally sure if it works, honestly. Indeed maybe cinema should only be for stories that occur in a short while, with every ellipsis explicitly marked by a subtitle: “one year later” or whatever. The moments have to have their coherence if you work with one shot per scene because the whole essence of this technique is that time flows like in real time. You don’t eliminate the moments that aren’t important or relevant – everything is relevant, as in real life.
RW: What was your approach to shot composition and lighting?
CM: I wanted to build something on white, as if I were painting on a white canvas. But it happened that the snow came quite late in the film, so I was hindered in this objective. Any film is made of what you plan plus what then happens. For the interiors we had a different kind of problem. This is a place with no electricity. I had to ask my cinematographer to make it look as realistic as possible, but especially for the night scenes. To shoot people dressed in black at night with no electricity raises some problems because we never want to actually see where the light comes from. We wanted to have it seem as natural as possible, so the cinematographer had to use a lot of candles. Normally the walls of such monastic cells are white but you can’t really shoot black with white in dark light because it doesn’t look good. So we ended up having everything in tones of grey and at the end we reinforced the look by desaturating the colours quite a lot. We did the same thing in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days: there’s a reduction of between thirty and forty per cent of the colours, and what you get as a result are very strong blacks, which really speak a lot. What I like is to have a composition with big portions of colour, with pretty much shades of the same colours, but not very colourful, with lots of geometrical elements too.
Painting on white
The scenes are like moving photos. Since I don’t cut, the first thing I do when I’m on set is to identify the camera position from where I’m going to cover pretty much all of the situation. The final shot has to do the work of several shots in another film. I like at the beginning to see the whole space but then I move with the character. The camera never moves unless a character is moving.
RW: What about your use of sound?
CM: You find out immediately when you decide to do only one shot per scene that there are going to be a lot of things which you just can’t shoot. It’s difficult to work like this: you have to learn how to use the off-camera a lot. For example, we learned that it’s not going to be good have all the dialogue spoken in the shot. This isn’t powerful. We also learned how to use off-camera sound, to rely a lot on things you don’t see but you hear.
There’s a scene that relies only on sound. After Voichița unties Alina at the end, she gets back to her cell and sits on her bed and just listens. She hears a couple of footsteps on the snow approaching and then the dog starts barking. The footsteps stop for a while and then resume. Finally you hear a gate opening. The sounds correspond to Voichița’s hope that Alina will leave. Actually it must be someone else walking outside, but what’s powerful is the character’s projection. Using off-camera sound like this means that the spectator can witness what’s in the mind of the character but not in the shot itself.
Alina and Voichița
RW: What’s the nature of the friendship between Alina and Voichița?
CM: Each of them is trying to convince the other that she’s on the wrong track and each of them is doing this out of the love that she feels for the other. In the end, the one who succeeds is Alina. The film doesn’t tell you about her reasons, but I suspect Alina doesn’t leave after she’s untied because she has a point to make. It’s not about leaving, it’s about making the other open her eyes. This is her whole struggle. It’s the same thing with Voichița, only she comes to understand that she’s wrong this time. For me, she’s the main character. The crucial thing is that we witness the moment when somebody changes something about herself.
Voichița isn’t somebody who’s religious who loses faith. No: she’s not losing faith – she starts having doubts which for a religious person is a worse punishment than not being religious, losing faith completely. Whenever you’re sure about something it’s fine. But the greatest sin is to doubt and this is what happens to her. She’s differentiated visually by her big beige sweater at the end because she’s different now. The greatest punishment that she’ll have to endure is that she’ll live with this burden of feeling guilty for the rest of her life. She loses the comfort of the life that she’s had had in the monastery, this illusion of affection that she had among these people – and she’s not getting anything else in return. Because, you know, people don’t always want to be free. Freedom is a great burden, but Voichița understands that she has to take this responsibility to leave. She will leave: this is why she begins to dress differently. She’s getting back to the world. Where to exactly? She doesn’t know, I don’t know. But this is something that she has to do.
RW: Why does Alina go to such lengths to persuade Voichița?
CM: There’s a time in our lives – when we’re 16, 20, even 80 – when somebody that we really love a lot tells us that everything is finished. ‘Just go, we’ll be good friends’, which is even more awful. The love between these girls is a very, very strong bond because of what they went through together at the orphanage. It’s not only friendship. It’s the desire not to be alone in the world, to have somebody to love and trust, your only family. When Alina returns, she understands that she’s lost this person – and lost her in favour of someone you can’t even really punch, because Voichița is in love with God! And this is intolerable. This is something you can’t fight against. So, if you like, her madness comes from her love.
It’s not carnal love: it’s a need for affection that I wanted to explore. When you lose the affection that’s so important, you’ll get the strength to fight with all your means to get back the other. It isn’t rational. And any man or woman who’s ever been dumped knows that you’d do anything, however humiliating. This is what Alina does. The priest is a concrete manifestation she can actually fight. On top of this, I honestly believe this character is nonconformist. It’s not clear in the film – and I wanted it to be like this – if she’s mentally sick, if she’s possessed or if she’s just somebody with a strong personality who can’t tolerate rules. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a combination of all these.
The interview was conducted during the London Film Festival, 13 October 2012. Thanks to Jake Garriock at Artificial Eye for making the arrangements. Beyond the Hills premiered at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, where Mungiu won the award for Best Screenplay, and Flutur and Stratan shared the award for Best Actress. It was selected as the Romanian entry for the Best Foreign Language Oscar at the 85th Academy Awards. Beyond the Hills has a limited released in the UK on 15 March.