Aaron's Thoughts
Blown away by how much Mungiu is able to tackle in this without it feeling overstuffed. Few filmmakers would be able to pull from real life events and intricately weave together a screenplay that doesn’t just include all of these societal issues, but shows how connected they all are.
While there are many threads I could pull on, I think my favorite is how the film captures this shift in how we live and interact as humans. Whether you like it or not, there is something deep in the human psyche that resists new people coming to the land you call home. It used to be that when people were coming to our land it was because they wanted to take something from you or conquer you. And again, like it or not, It’s almost as if that is baked into our DNA. Our primal reaction is to revert back to thinking we are being conquered or having something taken away from us, even though that’s not how the world operates anymore. And so how do you live in a society where you have some people who acknowledge that and others that don’t have that awareness & let that primal urge take over? And what happens when that compounds due to overall economic uncertainty & concern. And what happens when local economies don’t just want this to happen but actually need it to happen for the world to keep going round? Who is to blame?
Well, there aren’t easy answers to any of those questions, but you better believe people have their opinions and feel strongly about them (As we see masterfully put on display in a 20 minute town hall sequence). When people start shouting it becomes clear that almost none of this is actually about the people themselves migrating into this town. It’s about what anxieties are projected onto them and what tasks people want them to perform. Aside from that, no one actually cares about the Sri Lankans.
I know there is so much more in the film that can be unpacked, but even just that is a richer text than almost anything made these days and amazing how it may be even more relevant today than back when it came out.
And as for the ending, I enjoyed reading all the theories out there, but my read is that the bears aren’t real. They are simply a manifestation of his anxieties. There are these big bad things out there trying to hurt him, that in reality aren’t really what he thinks they are (sound familiar). Just as the villagers project their economic anxieties and irrational hatred onto the foreign Sri Lankan bakery workers, the bears embody the looming & untamed terrors that humans create and project onto "outsiders”.
Fantastic film!
