Beyond the Hills (非常教慾)

My 18th film at the HKIFF takes me back to Europe. Beyond the Hills, the third feature film by Rumanian director Christian Mingiu is a neutral look at the plight of certain ignorant Orthodox Catholic peasant nuns in a remote part of Rumania who had little to look forward to except the promised salvation in a next life.

As the film opens we see two young ladies having an intimate conversation inside a room in a convent. Alina (Cristina Flutur), a non-believer who had been with Voichita (Cosmina Stratan) since they met an orphanage in Rumania at primary one and had developed a very intimate bodily relationship with her, has just arrived from Germany where she is working and tries her best to persuade her ex to join her to work on a German cruise ship. But Voichikta says that her heart has now been taken over by God and that she has decided to devote her life to Him. Alina is furious and will not stop until she gets her way. In the process, she got into conflict with the pragmatic autocratic, dogmatic but compassionate head of the convent, the Orthodox priest whom everyone there called "Papa" (Valeriu Andriuta) who genuinely believed that there are 364 types of sins of man. Nobody there seem to understand why Alina is an unbeliever and after having exhausted all the available means they can think of to make her see the "light" and after constantly praying for her soul but without any apparent success and after she tried to set her own room on fire in a suicide attempt, they decided that Alina must be possessed by the devil and then went on to perform an "exorcism" upon her, with the notional consent of Alina's semi-retarded brother, a ritual which involves having to restrain her and tying her to a wooden crucifix. As a result, the fiery and unstable Alina finally calms down. She dies. She is rushed to the hospital, where she is treated without any sympathy or any apparent care and concern. She is pronounced dead before arrival. In fact, the religious community had already sent her to the same hospital once but owing to lack of ambulance, they had to use their own vehicle. There, she was given an injection which calmed her down and was quickly sent back to the convent where the hospital staff said that she would probably haven been better taken care of.

Is Alina possessed by the devil? Or is she just suffering from temporary insanity brought on by her raging hormones? We see the contrast of how she is treated at the convent and at the hospital. At the convent she is treated with respect and there is genuine care and concern for her spiritual welfare but at the hospital, she is treated as just another patient which need to be treated and discharged as quickly as possible. Religious fervor prompted by ignorance, superstition and blind faith unaided by any scientific knowledge Vs scientific knowledge administered coldly, bureaucratically without any sentiments. Ignorant religious and spiritual care and completely secular rational indifference? Which is better? Which is worse?  Those seem to be the questions posed by the film. Whatever the true answer may be, at the end of the film we find policemen rounding up all the witnesses who were involved in the last hours of the life of Alina, like an obedient flock of sheep. The last we see them, they were driven back to town, the priest, the sisters and all who assisted the priest to perform the exorcism. to the rumbling sound of the motor of the police van. The acting by Flutur, Stratan and Andriuta is excellent as also that of the mother superior Dana Tapalaga. The cinematographic works by Oleg Mutu is beyond reproach: he fully captures the rural atmosphere and the helplessness of the well-meaning sisters as they collectively ran about and mechanically co-operated with each other in doing whatever the priest or the mother superior said needed to be done, like ants. The film based on a real event, and a non-fiction "novel" by Tatiana Niculescu Bran, leaves us wondering where the truth may lie.