2020 Directed by Cristi Puiu
Among the guests who come to the mansion of aristocratic landowner Nikolai over Christmas are a politician, a young countess, and a general with his wife. They dine and discuss topics such as progress and morality. As the debate becomes more heated, cultural differences become increasingly apparent.
SENSE Production Mandragora Cinnamon Films Film i Väst Bord Cadre Films Doppelganger Production 2006 Sisters and Brother Mitevski Iadasarecasa
매너 하우스, The Manor House, La conac
Produzent: „Hallo, Herr Bergman! Können Sie für uns einen 400 Minuten langen Film drehen, nach dem man sich so fühlt, als ob man abendländische Philosophie sein Vater gefickt hat?“
Bergman: „Theoretisch sehr gerne, praktisch bin ich aber leider tot. Aber fragen Sie doch mal Cristi Puiu, der schafft es auch in 200 Minuten und packt auch noch eine komplette Abhandlung aller Evangelien drauf.“
Produzent: „Geilomat! Mach ich - und entschuldigen Sie die Störung!“
Bergman [legt kopfschüttelnd auf und obwohl wir nichts sehen, spüren wir das Kopfschütteln]
Produzent: „Herr Puiu, können Sie...“
Puiu: „Ja.“
NYFF 2020: film #5
“if you know the answer, why ask the question?”
i really tried. this is wildly uninteresting, all philosophical filler with nothing tangible to grab onto. there’s a glimpse of possibility just after the mid point that held my attention, but was immediately discarded in place of more cold conversations that seem to run in circles. at least it looks nice!
I'm not sure if anyone else made this comparision before, but the film Malmkrog made me think throughout was Tarantino's The Hateful Eight, although the violence here is mostly verbal as fitting for a film about barbarism with great manners (as opposed to QT proudly savagery). Six people having a philosophical argument and treading intellectual insults as the dark underbelly of enlightment reveals a decadent aristocracy moving towards horror. Formally very accomplished, like all previous Puiu features it is a big low key epic done in a very specific style that he pushes to the limit. Very easy to get lost here if one decides to engage fully with discussons, but it seems to me far more rewarding to accept…
like an hour into the film, a character suggests they put the conversation (about war, morality, violence, politics, national identity, God, the Antichrist, culture, etc.) to bed because they'll never get through it, and the group almost unanimously decides to keep talking, which they do. there's a necessary, borderline abstract (?) dramatic trolling midway through, otherwise they just talk and talk. I sort of appreciate what it's getting at - the irony of its rhetorical exercise, these fake-smart idiots with no connection to the real world playing devil's advocate for a whole day - but 200 minutes of people being like "I wonder if there will be a World War One?" does get (purposefully) wearisome. obviously, Malmkrog is about grad school!
This is not just one of the best films of the year but already one of the best of the new decade. A pure work on rhetorics of mise-en-scène, and rhetorical mise-en-scène.
saying Malmkrog over and over again in the mirror so that aristocrats having conversations about Hungarian materialism and theological philosophy can spontaneously appear in my bedroom. the sad thing about me is that I’d have given everything to see this movie about pretentious assholes endlessly discoursing until they’ve got nothing left to say but their own hateful classist beliefs in a theatre. Puiu’s set-up is deceptively simple but what he manages to pull off is the feeling of the words becoming gradually more meaningless as the film goes on, what they’re saying isn’t what’s important, it’s what they’re not. they sit at their chairs, talking about the world in theory, as they hold power for change and use none of…
3½ hours of monotonous, philosophical dialogues musing on religion, war, history and other wearisome concepts. I’m sure a ton of intellectual cinephiles will eat this up, but my moronic self was left cold by this visually interesting but redundant artistic experiment.
The reviews on here are beyond divisive. So calling it an unheralded masterpiece and some saying it's absolute trash.
I want to take a more middle ground and say this is absolutely well made and at times very engaging. Almost 4 hours of talking, but when a burst of something else happens, my jaw dropped.
That said, good lord this movie was indulgent and the dialogue isn't as intelligent as the director thinks. At times it reminded me of a freshman philosophy courses.
Also, people will knock a movie and say it could have cut 10 or 20 minutes out and been better. I'm not kidding, this movie probably could have cut about an hour and a half out and maintained the same point while losing nothing
Malmkrog opens with a snowy landscape covered in shades of white. Then it moves indoors and becomes a three hour conversation between a bunch of elites in late 19th Century Europe. These few characters, among them a politician, a countess, and a general's wife, embark on an adventure that centres on long philosophical debates. Their most prominent topics are war, religion, and morality, but they are go beyond them too. They are charismatic speakers and command attention, though the conversation becomes more dense as each scene passes. There is no real ending, just a culmination of exhaustion that leaves you knowing this discussion could never end.
Malmkrog is a classic example of slow cinema, which seems so prevelant in the…
A film that is, perhaps, almost the exact mode of analysis Domenico Losurdo did not pursue when unpacking the question of "What is liberalism?" in his 2006 book 'Controstoria del Liberalismo' (English: 'Liberalism: A Counter-History'). Through his writing the philosopher attempted to come to an answer through the provision of a history—one which specified what "the liberal movement and liberal society[... were] in their concrete reality" and investigated what this reality is by accounting for "the conceptual developments... [and] political and social relations it found expression in, as well as the more or less contradictory link that was established between these two dimensions of social reality". The Italian was, however, clear—he did not intend to engage with "liberal thought in…
