Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days (2007) and Beyond the Hills (2012): Romanian auteur Cristian Mungiu and the paradoxes of ‘anti-national national cinema’

This discussion of Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s internationally circulated ‘popular highbrow’ films – 4 luni, 3 saptamâni si 2 zile/Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days (2007); and Dupa dealuri/Beyond the Hills (2012) – is grounded in the auteur theory. In particular, the analysis telescopes in on the thematic motif of surveillance that animates the two films. At the same time, on a Foucauldian view, the motif plays out in distinct forms in each cinematic text. In Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, surveillance in the late Ceaus¸escu-era is depicted as gaining expression through the internalized discipline of the monadic subject. In contrast, in the contemporaneous Beyond the Hills, surveillance implicates the practices of the pure community convened in distinction to an exiled other. Psychoanalytic concepts (primal crime, return of the repressed) are also summoned to tease out the social tensions in the films. Mungiu’s work vigorously cross-­examines the official mythologies of national harmony; in other words, Mungiu may be construed as engaging with what Mike Wayne calls ‘anti-national national cinema’. However laudable the practice of socially conscious critical film is, auto-problematization of ‘peripheral’ nations may also bring reproduction of marginalization in its train when the films circulate internationally.