Three Kilometres to the End of the World review – brutal self-denial in deepest Romania

Here is a self-laceratingly painful tale of repression and denial in a remote Romanian village in the Danube delta, directed by Emanuel Parvu. It’s in the gimlet-eyed observational and satirical style of the new Romanian cinema, a kind of movie-making that in extended dialogue scenes seeks out the bland bureaucratic language of the police and church authorities; their evasive mannerisms, their reactionary worldviews and lifelong habits of indicating opinions in quiet voices and in code, things they don’t want to be held responsible for, and for things they want to keep enclosed in silence.

The drama concerns a careworn guy, Dragoi (Bogdan Dumitrache), who owes money to a local tough guy and is badly behind with the debt. Then he discovers that his 17-year-old son Adi (Ciprian Chiujdea), the apple of his eye – whom he is planning to send to military school next year, and whom he fondly imagines to be dating a local girl – has been badly beaten up by the money-lender’s sons. With icy rage, Dragoi takes this to be the man’s unforgivably violent way of demanding his money.

But the moneylenders’ sons themselves claim with chilling moralism that they did this because they saw Adi kissing a male Bucharest tourist outside a disco. The local cop is entirely happy therefore to let the matter pass, believing in fact that it is Adi who has committed the offence. A pompous local priest is prevailed upon by Adi’s distraught mother to carry out a kind of anti-gay exorcism with Adi bound and gagged while priest and parents solemnly chant prayers over him with lit candles. In his own unbearably moralistic way, the moneylender (who is hand in glove with the police, and appears to have offered the police officer some kind of post-retirement job) offers to cancel the debt if Dragoi can prevail upon his son to withdraw the complaint.

Adi’s rage and humiliation unfolds in parallel with his father’s. The older man had already been ground down by his failure to pay the debt. Yet the film shows that the thought that Adi’s beating had something to do with the loan, however enraging, did in fact offer Dragoi a salve to wounded pride. There was almost a tragic nobility in being the hardworking debtor whose innocent son was beaten up, two-against-one, on the order of a petty money-grubbjng coward. But now that status has been taken away and replaced with what the homophobic orthodoxy decrees is a simple embarrassment.

There are acid touches in the screenplay. The police officer’s doltish deputy greedily avails himself of the snacks laid out by the moneylender when the police visit him at home. (Clearly, it would be more professional not to accept.) Inevitably, the cop himself yearns for Romania’s good old days: “At least Ceaușescu’s canals stopped the rivers from silting up…” he grumbles. There is an oblique power in the way that Adi himself hardly ever speaks in the movie – not about himself, not about his feelings, not about his identity. The nearest we come to this kind of disclosure is when his father makes Adi reveal his private texts to this Bucharest tourist: an ordeal of privacy-invasion. A tough, sinewy drama about a whole community that wants to look away from others’ differences and its own culpability.