It all starts in the Wonderland Dino Park in Cluj in Roman. While a torn down, lonely scolding man collects mushrooms and bottles with a large plastic bag, tubes and animatronic dinosaur sculptures are thanks to them. A bright contrast, which is characterized by a very dark comedy, is not only characteristic of the pictures that Radu Jew is looking for again and again in his films, but also for the post -communist Romanian society.
For example, if you roam through the streets of the capital Bucharest, you will be overwhelmed by the heterogeneity of the cityscape. Remains of the historic old town stand alongside the totalitarian splendor of the dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, and in between the glass temple of capitalism have been popped in again for a good three decades. Walk through contradictions, a beautiful picture for the cinema of the Radu Jude (“don't expect too much from the end of the world”).
The scenes in the dino park, which is visited twice in the film, are definitely among the most beautiful moments of “continental '25”.
However, his new film leads us to Transylvania, into a region that is no less torn. In “Continental '25“However, other historical divisions play a central role. So Radu Jude takes us the scene of Cluj in the originally Hungarian region as torn from nationalism. With the most vulgary anti-Hungarian swear words, the bailiff Orsolya (Eszter Tompa) is always considered, and although her husband notes that they could have always laughed together in the past, Orsolya has long since laughed.
Once only, she lets herself be pulled back in similarly racist gesture: Why Romanians don't play in “Star Wars”, she asks her former student Fred (Adonis Tanța) for a joint drilling and immediately in front of a dreary, drunk fuck in a night park. “Because they don't even want to work in the future,” is the funny answer.
The struggle with your own conscience
To this point, however, we have accompanied Orsolya for a while, on a path through the city and the film, which has its starting point in a tragedy. Because the unemployed old man, whom we met in the early minutes of “Continental '25”, has committed suicide, and Orsolya is responsible for his death. With a evacuation command and a troop hooded gend arms, she stood in front of the door of his poor accommodation in a heating cellar to clear it on behalf of a large real estate group.
A “Hotel Continental” is to be built there, and at least a month was able to get it for the old Ion (Gabriel Spahiu). There is nothing more to be done, and for your own good conscience, she doesn't take evacuation in the hard winter months anyway. Finally, you have to expect the people thrown on the street.
Orsolya (Eszter Tompa) and the gendarmes give the old man a few more minutes to go together before the evacuation.
The involvement of such contradictions, the arrangement and winding through in an inhuman system, the pent-up rage and the little malice of the everyday fortexist, all of these are the basic topics in almost all films by Radu Jude: a filmmaker that is one Not only because of its award with the golden bear (2021 for “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn”) The big one of the Romanian contemporary cinema must count, even if his films are very deliberately kept small.
Not necessarily in relation to the extent of the social panoramas that he outlines in them – on the contrary, they are often exciting and generously encyclopedic. But the shapes in which he staged are often very deliberately kept small, the films are filmed openly into the impure. In places, even with a autofocus of the digital camera used, which brings a strange tremor in the picture – the trembling of a cheap camera technology that automatically focuses on again and again because it does not know what exactly it should actually focus.
The high art of the supposedly amateurous
This tremor is known from amateur videos on social networks, which simply hold moments in snapshots without a claim, and exactly this fragile aesthetics of the informal unartress strives in “Continental '25”. This makes this new film quite a counter -design to previous, also cutting socially critical, but formally playfully fanned out masterpieces such as “I don't care if we go down in history as barbarians”.
Basically, “continental '25” is a drift film. After the death of the old man, Orsolya canceled family vacation and remains alone in Cluj. Here she meets her mother and a girlfriend who works for an NGO, but still disgusts himself from the homeless who lives in her garage and poops in front of the goal. In addition, she finally gets into an affair with the much younger Fred. Fuck the Pain away.
Fred (Adonis Tanța) has been working as a meal driver since his degree.
Many of these scenes appear improvised and remain as unfocused as the automatic zoom of the digital camera, with which all of this is captured. It is actually obvious that all of this should be exactly the same and it is a conscious direction of Judes. A raw, unshaped film, shaken quickly out of the sleeve and more out of anger than out (albeit cynical) joy.
This anger at least can always be felt, and it is also that “continental '25” ultimately carries – even if you don't hink to determine that this is no more than an ancillary work. Radu Jude may have saved the big, radical all-round for his well-awaited AI Vampire film “Dracula Park”.
Conclusion: Formally and narratively consciously kept simple and often improvised, “continental '25” never really gets beyond the status of a secondary work. The anger with which the great Romanian director Radu Jude films it out of his sleeve and throws us in front of our feet is still noticeable and considerable, and it alone is that still wears this film halfway.
We saw “Continental '25” as part of the Berlinale 2025, where it was shown as part of the official competition.