SGIFF33 Film Reviews: Leila's Brothers (2022) and R.M.N. (2022)
It’s the last day of 2022 and I’ve been sitting on these reviews for far too long so here they are a little less polished than I’d like but here all the same. I hope 2022 has been good on you dear reader, and here’s wishing you a fantastic new year ahead.
Leila’s Brothers (2022)
At every critical juncture of Leila’s Brothers (2022), I found myself fully resigned to the ways in which Leila and her family will make the single worst decisions possible for their economic situations and social standing. I cannot imagine a more dire set of circumstances for a group of characters so blind to the ways they have set themselves up for failure and yet Saeed Roustaee’s Leila’s Brothers (2022) announces itself as a riotously funny feel-bad movie that had a man in the front row laughing his head off and me shaking my head with a smile tinged with schadenfreude.
While the film may draw comparison to the moral quandaries of fellow Iranian Asghar Farhadi, it operates much more like a tragic farce, and is all the funnier for it. While Farhadi might tie you in a complex moral knot, Roustaee sets in motion a cascading set of decisions toward destitution.
Leila, played with great urgency and intensity by Tarane Alidoosti, is the seemingly only sensible and gainfully employed member of a family of four layabout brothers who cannot catch a break and two parents who cannot stand her meddling. When a sudden bit of wealth is discovered, she concocts a plan to ensure the economic security of her brothers, while her father fights to use that same wealth to buy the respect he has never had.
It may seem cruel to call this funny, but I think it would have been far more miserable and difficult to watch had it been dead serious. The humour is rapid fire in the acidic barbs that the family hurls at each other as casually as the next breath they take. However, even as the siblings insult each other, there’s familial warmth. Everyone genuinely wants to do right by their brother, their father, their mother, but still everyone chooses to put themselves first. It’s a tricky balance but Roustaee nails it.
Leila’s scheme involves buying a set of shops in a bustling mall, one each for each of her brothers, the site of which currently resides in the washroom that brother Parviz currently cleans. You can smell the irony of putting all their dreams in the toilet as they present the site to their father amidst the spluttery sounds of men doing their business. It is at points like these that it feels like Roustaee might have pushed it too far in comically amplifying the situation of his characters, but he has walked the line so finely throughout the film that a scene as ridiculous as this is still welcome.
Despite the broad, sometimes juvenile humour, Roustaee manages to characterise each family member in a way that allows you to see their perspectives no matter how warped. Even amidst tragedy, the family finds ways to laugh at their own plight; we laugh with them and not at them, and there lies all the difference.
Notes:
Tarane Alidoosti is currently under arrest by the Iranian government for denouncing the authoritarian regime and supporting the ongoing protests. My heart goes out to her and the Iranian people who are fighting against oppression.
R.M.N. (2022)
Named after the Romanian acronym for an MRI, the obliquely titled R.M.N. (2022) suggests director Cristian Mungiu’s intention to expose the insidious darkness of the Romanian psyche, but all he uncovers has already been on the surface all along. The film centers on the stoic Matthias, who returns home to a quiet Transylvanian village to involve himself with his son Rudi’s upbringing after abruptly quitting his job in Germany with a headbutt response to a colleague calling him a “gypsy.”
Gruffly masculine, unlikable, and obtuse, Matthias is frustrated by what he thinks is the overbearing care Rudi’s mother is giving the child who has been spooked by a horrible sight in the woods that he refuses to speak about. On the side Matthias hooks up with his on and off again lover, Csilla, who runs a bakery with her boss. The bakery, the largest factory in the village, is forced to hire migrants from Sri Lanka to fill up job postings that have been left unfilled by a village population that would rather find work elsewhere in Europe.
Csilla, Hungarian and assimilated outsider, becomes employer-protector to the Sri Lankans, defending them from the racist hatefulness of the village and emerges as the true protagonist of the film. Csilla being a key figure in this central conflict makes one wonder why Matthias is the entry point into this film. He cares nothing for and has nearly nothing to do with the brewing public outcry. Matthias acts as mercenary to both camps, on one hand allegedly participating in violent behavior against the Sri Lankans, and on the other giving them rides on his motorcycle.
Much ink has been spilled heralding the virtuosity of a seventeen minute long-take wherein members of the community attempt to debate whether the Sri Lankans should be allowed to stay. The shot is masterfully scripted, staged and blocked from the viewpoint of an unmoving camera, but the hatefulness on display is rudimentary. We’ve heard all these things before. In the repetition of racist vitriol, Mungiu achieves little than to make apparent what is already obvious. Bigots, regardless of geography, have been saying the quiet part out loud for centuries. The quiet part was never quiet.
Mungiu’s film is not built or directed at the people whose minds he most wants to change, his film is made for the Csillas in the audience. By anonymizing the bigots as a herd of hatred, there’s little to latch onto and to question how they have come to be this way and how they remain so. The irony of a people who meet discrimination outside their borders, but similarly will spurn the migrants that come to their village for employment is clear, but what of it? If anything, the film only functions as a validator for you, the supposed enlightened non-racist, to agree that, yes, bad people do exist and you should be proud you are not one of them. However, it offers nothing constructive nor insightful about this state of affairs. Mungiu merely points things out.
The most interesting remark that arises from the town hall meeting is the brief criticism leveled at the factory that has decided to hire the migrant workers: they do it to keep wages low. Csilla and her employer are exploiting global labour and it is their financial interest to protect the Sri Lankans. They know the intolerant atmosphere of their town, and yet they bring the Sri Lankans in anyway and put them in harm’s way. However, the film spends little to no time investigating this, presenting Csilla entirely as a virtuous employer, even though profitability is the ulterior motive.
Even with the film’s supposedly noble intentions, it is frustrating that the Sri Lankans, the target of all this condemnation, remain ciphers. They have families, they cook good food and that is all we know. They are used to help delineate the good and bad Romanians, but they are not characters of their own. They function only as subjects to be fought over, attacked or protected. The film cares little for their perspective and, as characters, they are defined by the hate they must endure.
Maybe the most curious stylistic choice in the film is the use of Yumeji’s theme by Shigeru Umebayashi, the famous lilting and longing tune that is the emotional girder to Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000). An assuredly distracting choice for anyone steeped in global film culture, I found its inclusion utterly confounding. Csilla plays the tune on her cello at various points in the film. I have read that other critics understand it as a motif and signifier of culture and that it presents Csilla as one of “higher culture” and thus a little removed from the people she is trying to help. Unfortunately, I think the argument holds little water, and Mungiu positions Csilla as heroine and little more. With its obtuse storytelling and simplistic moralism, R.M.N. (2022) aims for profundity but ends up being perplexing, frustrating, and leaving me in the mood for something to love.