♦ Malm Area, by Cristi Puiu (Romania, Serbia, Switzerland, Sweden, Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia), 3:20 a.m.
Originally from Romanian Moldavia, Cristi Puiu, after studying art in Geneva, turned to cinema and collaborated in screenwriting with Lucian Pintilie. In 2001, the Directors’ Fortnight presented its first feature film, the gear and the money, followed, still in Cannes, by the Death of Dante Lazarescu (2005) and Aurora (2010) to a Certain Regard, then Sieranevada, in competition in 2016. Malm Area, his latest opus, inspired by the text of Vladimir Soloviev, Russian theologian and poet (1853-1900), Three Interviews on War, Morality and Religion (1), received the prize for best director at the Berlinale 2020.
You made a work with actors, ten years ago, inspired by this same text, Three Interpretation Exercises. Was it a rehearsal to achieve the great work that is today Malm Area ?
Cristi Puiu It was a small essay carried out as part of an internship organized in 2011 in Toulouse by the Chantiers nomades, who produced it with my company, Mandragora. The main question concerned the movement of the actors according to the spoken word as much as it comes from elsewhere and from another era. I then became interested in the presence of the actors and their commitment to the subject. It was to create pressure on them because the camera then becomes a machine gun. I was inspired by Louis Malle’s film, My Dinner with Andre, and the work of Eric Rohmer.
The Three Interviews de Soloviev took place in 1900 in a villa in Cannes. The interviews of Malm Area had to be filmed inside a manor house in a Saxon village in Transylvania…
Cristi Puiu I wanted this to happen inside with the snow outside so that the house could become a real shelter. It was very difficult to find such a place in France or Moldova. The manor of Malancrav, one of the last Saxon villages in Romania, was ideal because the team could shelter there and eat good Austro-Hungarian cuisine. Malm Area means the inn, but I especially like the emotional sound that reminds me of melancholy!
Your cinematographic work is an incredible setting in space of the speech, defined by the behavior of the bodies of the actors arranged in the space of the living room of the manor like the pieces of a chess game…
Cristi Puiu Absolutely, it’s about getting closer to the characters little by little. For the opening scene, a long sequence in which Ingrida gives her speech on the war, I had to do sixty takes. Because, as with Shakespeare, the actors speak as if the world were a theater scene. At the beginning, cinema was filmed theater. Subsequently, I frame Edouard, the “European” politician, or Olga, the fervent Orthodox, in close-up like a painter who would paint their portrait.
The film is presented in six parts, the second is devoted to Istvan, the butler, who is not considered with Soloviev, and you gave the role of the Russian general to his wife, Ingrida, that of the prince to the young Olga…
Cristi Puiu Istvan represents, within this dominant aristocratic society, the coming Bolshevik revolution. Hence the unexpected shooting! I did not want the general to be “alive” on the screen because he would, from his real experience of the horrors of war, unbalance the whole. Ingrida thus better defends the general’s position by “playing” the role of her husband. I like to “save” my characters. As for the prince, I wanted him to be represented by an innocent girl with a virgin gaze, a being of emotion, Tolstoy in front of Nikolai-Mister Z, Soloviev himself, who lectured him. So we have the three ages of life represented, men and women.
Finally, Malm Area, announcing the end of a world, would it not present itself as a form of cultural rebalancing by giving a vision of the universe coming from central and eastern Europe?
Cristi Puiu Like Soloviev’s speech, Malm Area offers a reflection on the struggle of good and evil, an awareness in my case regarding my fear of being a small insect in the face of political power, a way of asking myself questions about death. I, who only want to look at the sky and write poems.
(1) Ad Solem Éditions SA, Geneva, 2005. Translated and presented by Bernard Marchadier.
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