Scarred Hearts

Radu Jude's film version of Max Blecher's acclaimed novel "Scarred Hearts" has the feel of a sly black comedy, braced - with a too-literal metaphor, perhaps - by existentialist musings.

The film is set in 1937 in a Romanian sanitorium. Manu (Lucien Teodore Rus) spends almost the entirety of the film's two and a quarter hours flat on his back on a wheeled bed, put there by spinal tuberculosis that is eating away at his vertebrae and causing him abscesses. More is to follow - an atrophied leg, fistulae, surgery. Manu's prognosis is, according to the hale and cheery Dr. Ceafalan (Serban Pavlu), good; with luck, before Christmas arrives the young man will be out of the full-torso cast they've slipped around him like a straightjacket.

Meanwhile, Manu spends his days making new friends, including two women with whom he pursues romances. Isa (Ilinca Harnut) is, like himself, confined to bed and walled up in a cast, a confinement she has endured for years; their attempts at sex, when they take place, have a sad and yet funny (in a Woody Allen sort of way) quality. Solange (Ivana Mladenovic), however, is a more hopeful case, having been ill but recovered. Manu proposes to her in a fit of optimism, but such sunny moments become increasingly less frequent as his new friends (including a brace of male companions who include him, as best they can, in their raucous japes) start to fall away; they die, or recover, or depart to hospitals.

Manu is more or less a stand-in for Blecher himself, who suffered the same illness and died at the age of 29. But this isn't merely a thinly veiled biopic; though made in 2016 the film almost feels custom made to our own times. Manu, who is Jewish, engages Solange and the others in conversations that mash philosophy with politics and, when things get too bleak, mocking quotations of advertisement slogans. Telling Solange about the time he heard young boys in the street yelling "Die, filthy Jews!" - to no one's outrage or surprise - Manu expresses something too many of us feel now: That the world is hardly startled by homicidally-tinged sentiments of brutality and hatred. That realization, Manu confides, was the most frightening moment of his life. We kind of know where he's coming from.

But for all that, Jude - and Rus, whose rail-thin body seems tailor made for the role - find sweet grace notes and an underlying, almost cosmic, sense of humor in the story. It's a gallows humor, to be sure, and its tidal force takes time to accrue, but it's a powerful force that carries the film.