{"id":15036,"date":"2022-06-22T21:00:16","date_gmt":"2022-06-23T01:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=15036"},"modified":"2022-06-22T17:50:28","modified_gmt":"2022-06-22T21:50:28","slug":"beyond-the-hills-2012-cristian-mungiu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/15036","title":{"rendered":"Beyond the Hills (2012, Cristian Mungiu)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Not trying to join the Stereogum Anniversary Culture, but I happened to watch this on the tenth anniversary of its premiere.  This is bound to happen at least once during Cannes Week.  Rounding out my viewing of Mungiu&#8217;s major features right before his brand-new one debuted, this one&#8217;s a prime example of a movie good enough to transcend its dreary subject matter (insular religious cultures; see also <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/8588\">Silent Light<\/a><\/em>).<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image21\/beyondhills3.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>Much of the appeal is in the character of Alina (Cristina Flutur of <em>Backdraft 2<\/em>, what?).  She and Voichita (Cosmina Stratan of the <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/14367\">Border<\/a><\/em> guy&#8217;s surrogate pregnancy movie) were orphanage sisters, now separated, and Alina returns to visit then refuses to leave.  She&#8217;s extremely needy, fearing abandonment, but also acts impossible so she can&#8217;t stay anywhere.  Both the hospital and Voichita&#8217;s quiet monastery say they&#8217;re overcrowded during renovations, and anyway, Alina isn&#8217;t a believer.  But she&#8217;s devoted to her friend, so the nuns read Alina a list of all 464 sins to see which she has committed, then when she&#8217;s violent they tie her down to drive out her evil spirits, but she&#8217;s also convulsive, and they leave her tied too long, and she dies.  Seems like an openhearted, respectful take on a tragic story, made in the good ol&#8217; master-shot long-take foreign-arthouse style.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image21\/beyondhills1.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image21\/beyondhills2.jpg\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Not trying to join the Stereogum Anniversary Culture, but I happened to watch this on the tenth anniversary of its premiere. This is bound to happen at least once during Cannes Week. Rounding out my viewing of Mungiu&#8217;s major features right before his brand-new one debuted, this one&#8217;s a prime example of a movie good [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1049,2279,63,87],"class_list":["post-15036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-2010s","tag-cristian-mungiu","tag-religion","tag-romania"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15036"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15036\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15074,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15036\/revisions\/15074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}