There are any number of unique and memorable lines in Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude’s characteristically stinging “Kontinental ’25,” but the most trenchant of them all is borrowed secondhand from Bertolt Brecht: “The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to die.” Cynically referring to the Trotskyists accused in the show trials that Stalin staged in Moscow as part of the Great Purge, Brecht’s comment is still debated in part because its degree of sincerity is so hard to parse. Jude’s own provocations (including “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” and “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World”) tend to wear their heart on their sleeve more than most public figures could at the height of the Soviet Union, but their side-eyed profiles of today’s social ills are similarly caustic and cagey all at once. Jude’s sympathies are as generous as his arguments are damning, and the friction created between those forces has sparked some of the only recent comedies that feel as complex and absurd as real life has become. His latest film is another one of those. Shot on an iPhone with the same crew that Jude had already collected for his forthcoming epic about the Dracula myth, “Kontinental ’25” naturally feels like the scrappy and scabrous B-side to a larger project about Transylvanian self-identity. Its moral dimensions are more straightforward than those in Jude’s previous work (and its form much simpler in kind), but only because their practical applications are that much knottier in return. Where “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” and “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World” scaled their characters’ personal depravities against sprawling backdrops of systemic abuse, the far more intimate — and less uproarious — “Kontinental ’25” filters the perversity of neoliberalism through the eyes of a well-meaning woman’s attempt to do the right thing. Alas, a bold act of kindness can be a terrible cross to bear in a culture that’s sustained by ambient cruelties.~this review continues on IndieWire~
