Directors’ fortnight
Nothing prevents seeing the Romanian “new wave”, which appeared in the early 2000s, as a cinema of stagnation. Of the old man of The Death of Dante Lazarescu (2005) turning in circles in the maze of the hospital system with the father compromising himself in illicit maneuvers so that his daughter may obtain her diploma in Baccalaureate (2016), all his heroes had in common to cross post-communist society as one sinks into quicksand. Invited to the Directors’ Fortnight with his eighth feature film, Radu Muntean, painter of the Romanian middle class and its mistakes, does not do otherwise, remaining faithful to a movement whose leading figures (Cristian Mungiu, Cristi Puiu, Corneliu Porumboiu) have taken divergent paths. Intregalde could be summed up as the story of a monumental stalemate, that of a small troop of characters on the path marked out by their clear conscience.
The volunteers of a humanitarian association go on a trip to the Transylvanian heights aboard 4X4 which allow them to carry bags of food to distribute them to the inhabitants of the most remote villages, cut off from any modernity. Three of them – a boy, Dan (Alex Bogdan), and two girls, Ilinca (Ilona Brezoianu) and Maria (Maria Popistasu) – cross paths with a rambling old man, somewhat perched, who invites himself aboard and made them deviate onto a small dirt road. The vehicle cannot resist it and gets stuck at the first paddling pool. Lost in the middle of nowhere, without a telephone network, surrounded by the winter cold, given up to strange encounters and having no other shelter than their car, the three townspeople must resolve to spend an extremely agitated night there. puts their good intentions to the test.
A small theater of expectation and exasperation
Intregalde is thus presented as a dismantling in rule of the psychology of the good Samaritan, here ridiculed like the neurosis of a privileged class whose deep spring would be an unacknowledged form of bad conscience. The story, written by Muntean with his faithful duo of screenwriters Razvan Radulescu and Alexandru Baciu, orchestrates the meeting between these young city dwellers steeped in good intentions, and the last of the destitute, who do not correspond to the preconceived frameworks of the generosity of the former. Like this troublesome old man whose volunteers soon realize that he is losing his temper and after whom we must resolve to run to save him from a freezing night. The wait is none other than the time necessary to apprehend the other in his real misery (the old man quickly revealing himself to be insulting and incontinent), rather than making a fantasized and comforting image of him.
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