『Where Love Once Dwelt, the Shadow of Faith Fell.』
🎥 Movie Overview
🎬 Title: Beyond the Hills (După Dealuri, 2012)
🌍 Country: 🇷🇴 Romania / 🇫🇷 France / 🇧🇪 Belgium
🎞️ Genre: Drama / Based on a True Story / Psychological Relationship Narrative
⏳ Runtime: approx. 155 min
📢 Director & Screenwriter: Cristian Mungiu
📖 Based on: the works of Tatiana Niculescu Bran
👩💼 Cast: Cosmina Stratan – Voichiţa
Cristina Flutur – Alina
🧩 In-Depth Story Exploration (Spoilers Included)
🚉 The Essence of Romanian New Wave
Director Cristian Mungiu deepens the social realist and observational style he demonstrated in his previous film, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.
- Long Takes and Static Camera: The film uses long, fixed shots without any artificial background music, allowing the viewer to directly immerse themselves in the strict and isolated daily life of the monastery. This direction gives the impression of recording reality with emotional detachment, rather than judging the characters’ emotions or actions, which amplifies the tragic tone of the events.
- Setting and Atmosphere: The Orthodox monastery, where the story takes place, is portrayed as a space frozen in time and cut off from the modern world. The cold, desolate winter scenery and the monastery’s narrow, dark interiors visually reflect Alina’s psychological anxiety and isolation, creating a suffocating atmosphere.
- Layered Narrative: The film does not simply aim to denounce the ‘evil of religion’. The director also portrays the monastery’s pure faith, Alina’s mental instability, and the indifference of social institutions (hospitals, police), thereby presenting the complex interplay of causes that lead to tragedy.
⚓️ Their Only 'Family' and Source of Salvation
The relationship between Voichiţa and Alina begins in the desolate background of the orphanage where they grew up together. They represent a generation of orphans who survived by relying solely on each other, without any family or social safety net.
- Exclusive Bond: During their orphanage years, the two formed a deep and exclusive affection that transcended friendship. Alina often acted as Voichiţa’s protector, shielding her from external threats, while Voichiţa saw Alina as her only refuge and hope in the world.
- Spiritual Twins: Their connection goes beyond emotional attachment to something closer to a shared identity. They became whole only through one another. The film implies that Alina’s desperate obsession with keeping their bond alive stems from this “survival-based attachment.”
✝️ Love, Faith, and Two Irreconcilable Worlds
When Alina returns from working in Germany, she finds that Voichiţa has settled into a new life within an Orthodox monastery. Their relationship now faces a fundamental crisis, as their values and needs collide sharply, leading to an inevitable clash between two incompatible worlds.
- Alina: She sees the monastery as both a ‘rival’ that has taken Voichiţa away and a nightmarish manifestation of reality. For her, Voichiţa (human, exclusive love) is the only object of affection. Her goal is to take Voichiţa back to Germany with her. Unable to live without her, Alina’s isolation drives her to express yearning, obsession, anger, and rebellion against the monastery’s order. Her erratic actions (seizures, self-harm, defiance) are interpreted by the nuns as signs of demonic possession, but in truth, they are desperate cries to reclaim Voichiţa’s love.
- Voichiţa: She has found a new source of love in God and the priest (a sacred and encompassing devotion). Her goal is to remain in the monastery and find spiritual peace and salvation. The monastery serves as a safety net protecting her from past pain. She is torn between her deep human love for Alina and her newfound sense of belonging within the monastery, displaying a mix of obedience, calm, conflict, and mediation.
Although Voichiţa tirelessly tries to help Alina, she cannot prioritize Alina’s worldly love over the monastery’s rules. This mediating stance feels like ‘betrayal’ to Alina, further worsening her mental instability. Thus, although they love each other deeply, the two women’s choices for survival in their respective worlds create a tragic rift that cannot be healed.
💥 A Tragic End Born of Misunderstanding and Ignorance
Their relationship reaches a tragic conclusion when Alina’s mental anguish collides with the monastery’s blind faith.
- Misreading of Love: Alina’s intense affection and obsession are seen by the monastery members (and even by Voichiţa) as ‘madness’ or ‘demonic influence’. When love is misinterpreted through the lens of faith, Alina’s pain ceases to be a human issue and becomes a matter of blasphemy.
- Voichiţa’s ‘Sacrifice’: When Alina is chained and starved in the name of faith, Voichiţa chooses devotion as a sister to prove her love. She stays by Alina’s side, reading the Bible through the night, but cannot summon the courage to take her away from the monastery. This ultimately shows that religious devotion outweighs personal love in this tragedy.
- Isolation: Alina becomes not only physically isolated within the monastery but also emotionally severed from her only refuge, Voichiţa. This final isolation drives her to death.
Though they were each other’s only salvation, the monastery “Beyond the Hills” symbolizes an old, oppressive Romania that crushes their love, leaving them unable to save one another.
🕯️ Ignorance and Institutional Failure
The film deeply explores structural issues within post-communist Romanian society through the personal tragedy of these women.
- Blind Faith and Ignorance: The priest (Papa) and the nuns interpret Alina’s intense emotional and psychological episodes not as medical (paranoid schizophrenia) but as ‘demonic possession’. This exposes how systemic ignorance and fundamentalist faith can destroy a human life.
- Institutional Negligence: The film implies that not only the monastery but also modern institutions share the blame. The hospital sends Alina back without proper treatment, and the police and legal authorities respond half-heartedly, revealing a society that abandons those in pain.
- Symbols of Orphanhood and Poverty: Alina and Voichiţa symbolize the ‘orphan generation’ abandoned after the fall of communism. With no one else to rely on, one turns to religion and the other to the outside world, both ultimately heading toward ruin.
⚖️ Suspension of Moral Judgment
The film refrains from making any explicit moral judgment, instead presenting all aspects of the incident with cold observation, leaving the audience in a space of moral uncertainty.
- Ambiguous Responsibility: By never clearly stating who is to blame for Alina’s death (the monastery? the priest? the hospital? Alina herself?), the film prompts viewers to ponder how personal choice, religious fanaticism, and social structure intertwine in tragedy.
- Lingering Impact: After the tragic event, the film ends with the responsible figures riding in a police van through muddy water — an image that powerfully symbolizes the unresolved nature of Romania’s societal problems and the ‘dirty residue’ of the tragedy.
🎯 Personal (Taste-Based) Rating
💕 Love Scene Intensity: ♥♥
⭐ Rating: ★☆
Comments
Post a Comment