A bailiff has an identity crisis after a tragedy in Radu Jude’s new film, a scornful polemic on 21st-century Europe set between hope and despair

Once again, Romanian film-maker Radu Jude has given us a garrulous, querulous movie of ideas – a scattershot fusillade of scorn. It is satirical, polemical, infuriated at the greedy and reactionary mediocrities in charge in his native land and wobbling on an unstable cusp between hope and despair. Like his previous film Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World (whose lead actor Ilinca Manolache appears briefly in cameo here), Jude takes aim at bad faith and bad taste and takes us on what is almost a kind of architectural tour of Romanian malaise – this time in Cluj – in which he shows us the racism, nationalism, and a pointless obsession in the country’s governing classes with real estate and property development as a kind of universal aspiration. The movie closes with an acid montage of seedy public housing juxtaposed with gated private estates. And like the previous film, there is a repeated visual trope of a woman driving in a car, shown in profile, driving, driving, driving, looking for something – anything.

Kontinental ’25 is loosely inspired by Roberto Rossellini’s Europa ’51, in which Ingrid Bergman’s character is radicalised by a tragedy in her own life – a poster for this is shown in one scene in which our heroine is getting drunk in a cinema bar. Eszter Tompa plays Orsolya, a former law professor who has apparently lost her job and now humiliatingly works as a bailiff. She is now tasked with evicting a homeless, depressed man holed up in the squalid basement of an apartment building bought by a German property firm who intend to raze it to the ground and replace it with a luxury boutique hotel called the Kontinental (a building much bigger than the original and clearly conceived with minimal interest in the existing architectural forms).