Critics reviews

Is Malmkrog an ‘academic’ work? Insofar as much of what it achieves can only be appreciated with a copy of Solovyov’s text close at hand, the answer to that question has to be yes. But is that a problem? Puiu is a devoted believer in intellectual cinema; he has confidently stated that his film requires three viewings to really grasp what he’s doing.

The theoretical nature of the debates translates into a somewhat airless and theatrical mise-en-scene with shots that are always painstakingly composed by DP Tudor Panduru. But they quickly become repetitive, as there are only so many ways five people — one talking, the other four listening — can be arranged in handsomely appointed drawing or dining rooms.

The redundancy of the film’s verbal sparring seems to make the point that such philosophizing exists for its own sake, divorced from a reality that has consequences and draws blood. Is the extended runtime necessary? Maybe, maybe not. Stewing in the film’s carefully crafted atmosphere of hypocrisy is, however, essential; values and attitudes deconstruct when they’re oversoaked. But make no mistake, the ride will be demanding.

Puiu’s movie is a stark, wholly original work of adaptation that demands a Herculean degree of attention of its audience over the course of its 200 minute runtime. Yet its formal elegance is ample reward in itself.

Puiu seems to willfully thwart the most prominent assumptions of what cinema is supposed to be: this isn’t quite “visual storytelling,” let alone some Ebertian “empathy machine.” So what is it? Far more than the average film, Malmkrog seems to perversely beg the question of its own raison d’être.

The relentlessness of the crisply pronounced exchanges, with the camera roving from one speaker to the next, is so exhausting as to gradually drive even the most patient of viewers perfectly insane.

Locating the middle ground between Luis Buñuel’s satirical view of the upper class and Manoel de Oliveira’s radically modernist revisions of period literature, Puiu has emerged with one of recent cinema’s most formally daring and intellectually provocative new works.

It wouldn’t be cinema if Puiu hadn’t taken such pains to give his film a rigorous formal framework.

Although I got a lot out of this rigorously crafted intelligent work, I can’t in all conscience – conscience being a major topic here – recommend this film to the many. It’s too richly complex for the medium of film to convey, impossible to fully take in if you have to read subtitles while trying to think about big moral and philosophical questions.

What was mainly left were two things: Puiu’s thrilling ability to stage and block actors in a domestic space—used to greatly witty effect in his terrific last feature, Sieranevada—where the arranging and movement of people throughout a scene is thrilling, even when the film shockingly shifts to more conventional shot/reverse-shot dinner table talk; and absolutely spot-on casting of a group of wonderful archetypes.

This is a film of formidable and almost intimidating seriousness, which is admirable and refreshing in its way, but it does not make many concessions to anything as vulgar as entertainment or even drama (as that might be vulgarly conceived).

How is cinema put to best use? It’s an especially pertinent question since Puiu’s always stunning use of space and light, so carefully calculated in every shot, so rigidly composed as if he’s used dioramas with dolls to ensure figures and objects will be exactly in the right place, makes even “Malmkrog” a cinematic experience despite a perverse amount of verbiage that demands absolute concentration for nearly three and a half hours.