Heaven Knows We’re Miserable Now: R.M.N.
Horrifically based on a real life incident from 2020, this movie examines ethnicity, identity politics, racism and modern day village life in Romania. A Christmas movie this is not as essentially I’ve just watched a Christmaas-set lynching. Anything but tidings of comfort and joy to all people. But it does bare comparison with The Old Oak which covers similar themes, in this case from a different emotional viewpoint. R.M.N. stands for a medical term, nuclear magnetic resonance in Romanian, and contrasted with a diagnosis, seeks to scientifically examine behaviours and hearts on and under the surface of things.
Although everyone claims to be ‘local’ and to frequently and vociferously point out who isn’t ‘local’, everyone in the village is actually from very mixed heritage backgrounds. It’s Romania, but some are Hungarian, there is a German speaking minority and everyone seems to relentlessly hate on the Romani, who are continuously used as a term to insult or degrade. What even is the nation they live in, which has been pulled around under the ownership of different empires? Who even are we? and where are we going?
Terminology doesn’t help anyone here. Grumpy and feckless, although doing hard graft in a German slaughter house, Matthias (Marin Grigore) loses his temper when called a Romani (not using the G word here) and his job..and his coat. He gets othered just as the villagers other ‘outsiders’ and ‘incomers’ back home. He hitches from where he’s been working in Germany back to a snowy village, where he crashes back into his wife Ana (Macrina Bârlădeanu) and son Rudi’s (Mark Blenyesi) lives unannounced, chauvinistically bullying everyone. ‘Real men’ here shout at their wives, push them around, beat them, undermine their skills and abilities, and carry guns. They’re also very into telling women (any woman) what they can and can’t do, who they can and can’t see, who they can and can’t live with, and creepily lurking in their back yards in the dark or screaming at locked gates. What he seems to completely ignore is that while he’s been away, his wife has been dealing with a traumatised child and keeping everything going. As soon as he arrives, he completely undermines her parenting skills and style and rubbishes her infront of their son — everything she does is wrong and publicly criticised.
Objecting to her parenting methods cos ‘making the boy soft’, Matthias starts to work out what has caused his son to stop speaking. Is it the strange man lurking in the woods (who may or may not have been one of the local priests)? Is it because he came across a hanged body in the woods? Does he just need to play more sports like hockey and learn bushcraft?
As well as browbeating his wife, Matthias hunts for new work (there isn’t any locally) and picks up his affair with a local bakery manager, Csilla (Judith State), who he also tries to tell want to do, coercively control, push around and emotionally manipulate. Thankfully she is having none of his rubbish, or from anyone! The Beyonce of the village, this independent, musical woman is, in her unorthodox way, the moral heart of this story and the bridge between communities. (Whilst also being an ethnic minority herself).
There is a softer side to Matthias — he cares for his aged and increasingly ill father, who seems to keep having strokes and keeps his smallholding sheep farm going. Whilst Matthias battles systems to get his father the right care and seeks to empower his son through hunting, shooting and fishing, he can’t say ‘I love you’ to Csilla in their heart language. (Hungarian I think or maybe even German — Matthias got quite irrate at one point at his son not speaking German).
Orsolya Moldován’s Mrs. Dénes owns a local bakery, managed by Csilla and wants to expand. She also needs to tap into EU small business funding. To do all of this, by Christmas, she needs five more workers and no-one is responding to ads locally. Partly this is to do with low pay. Through an agency she gets three ‘Asian’ workers, who turn out to be Sri Lankans — no-one can quite get their ethnicity right. (Ironically for an area obsessed with its ethnic heritage and labelling people). Missing their families, who are at home or scattered across the world, they get on with it, do the job and work hard, navigating cultural and language barriers, lodging with a local family. (This is a multi-language film as we slip between Romanian/Transylvanian, German, Hungarian and English).
The three (yes, just three) men attempt to integrate themselves into village life — but are pushed out and shut out of one of the local churches. They cook, share food and music and join the Christmas party, which enrages one of the local chauvinists cos one of them was dancing with his sister. Cue mind losing all round.
Having collectively lost their minds, the village majority cancel their church service and shout down their priest in favour of a big meeting where they can shout some more. The worst kind of Twitter/X-verse debate in person, the villagers shout at each other, the three men are never allowed to speak or join the meeting and the shouty racist majority vote to force the men to leave their jobs and the village forever, boycott the buying of bread from the bakery until this happens; then everyone will live miserably ever after. Having had a fire bomb lobbed through the window, the men are forced to leave their lodgings — finding a sofa surfing safety with Csilla and then to the police station when they are forced to leave.
At the same time, it’s New Year and people are celebrating by dressing up as giant bears, waving fire torches around, riding around in masks and, it’s suggested, lynching people. One of the local priests (from the Hungarian minority) is found hung in the woods. Ana and Rudi are used as bait to lure Matthias to a meeting in the woods which suggest a lynching or retribution to come. Ultimately the only way is out — Csilla in disgust at all the injustice and unfairness leaves, taking a job in Germany. What will happen to her renovated parental home? We don’t know.
Harrowing doesn’t even begin to describe this film. It is a horror movie — but of real life. Like The Old Oak, there are bigger issues here — the economy (through the EU, multinational companies like forestry and everyone having to work away from the village to earn money, as well as a global economy potentially allows anyone to move and live and work anywhere). Clearly this has happened in the past as the village juggles multi-dialects — tellingly when they pray as a community, people ask ‘ which language?’ But what do the economic facts of the situation mean for this community now? Rather than welcoming or even trying getting to know these three men, they other, isolate, reject and descend into the worst and nastiest kinds of conspiracy theories. Without knowing them, all these assumptions bubble up — they are Muslim (i.e. anti-women and terrorists), they are disease carriers and unclean, they don’t do things properly, they take over, they increase…On and on these hateful, horrid labels shout — without facts. Ironically one of the men is a Catholic, another a Buddhist — the horrid community turned away one of their own, literally shutting the church doors on him. It’s weird how people could be in church and yet shout such hateful things.
Unlike The Old Oak, the ‘incomers’ lack voice and agency — we get snippets of who they are, but they are seen only through others. Thankfully not all the village feel so aggrieved — there is a fight at the community meeting as the bakery workers defend their colleagues, and everyone hates on the poor French ecology student. The men’s supporters speak, but are not listened to or heard. A few, like their landlady, have attempted to understand them — work out what they like to eat, include and invite, share lives and stories. And yet, the haters get what they want — and continue to live in denial of who they are or what they have done. Inspired by Csilla’s example, Matthias attempts to question what they are even voting for — hence the retribution towards him at the end. Tellingly his wife Ana seems to be on the side of the haters.
If you want a horror movie for spooky season, this is it. It made me sick to my stomach, for I had essentially watched a community organised lynching. Shutting someone out of a place of worship is just heinous — and the intriguers seemed to be lurching into Fascism or the ethnic cruelties of Communism by only seeing skin colour and deep othering. Wrongly too.
In contrast to The Old Oak there is little attempt to develop relationship and overcome the divides (no eating and sticking together) — here there is no hope, only suspicion and dread. A fourth worker is so terrified by the fire bombing that he flees and is never seen again, clearly hiding in the surrounding woods. Chillingly, villagers cheerfully remark during the public meeting and in casual conversations that they ‘got rid of the Romani’ — I could only think of anti-Semitism, the Shoah and ethnic cleansing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Ditr%C4%83u_xenophobic_incident
