Narratives of Cruel: Cristian Mungiu’s Cinematic Work and the Political Imaginary of East-Central Europe

Abstract

This article employs Lauren Berlant’s concepts of cruel optimism and impasse to explain the way the cinematic work of Cristian Mungiu comments on the condition of small East-Central European cultures. The article analyzes 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007), Beyond the Hills (2012) and Graduation (2016), and draws evidence from the narrative structure of these films, gender and social and economic condition of their characters, as well as the audiovisual poetics of their endings. The main point of the article is that Mungiu’s films criticize a mental mapping East-Central Europe with origins in the Cold War that imagines it as a region of small nations in the permanent state of danger and in need of urgent protection. Mungiu’s films show that this mapping exposes these cultures to inescapable cycles of political abuse. The slow and contemplative endings of Mungiu’s films also propose a solution. They gesture toward the development of a condition of political hovering that, as interruption, may enable East-Central European political imaginaries to envision more creative solutions to escape cycles of abuse. This interruption is linked to the memory of 1989 and to the historical openness 1989 created. As a political approach for East-Central European cultures, interruption is a strategy of letting one’s political imaginary be inspired to the opening of 1989.