The Circle’s opening scene might remind international connoisseurs of Mungiu’s R.M.N., with steps over a dry winter setting, the threatening presence of a hunter gun. Valeriu Andriuta’s film is however very much its own thing, compared to any other romanian film: meditative, eerie, more elaborate.
The setting is New Year’s Eve in 1999. Against the sense of an impending change, or even, an impending doom, the local police force in a rural town has to deal with a lethal gunshot accident occured during a hunting party. The elements are those of a noir story, with a detective sent in from outside, trying to piece together the chain of events, a non-linear structure of events, like in the 1965 hungarian film Twenty Hours or the rather similar 1977 film by Theo Angelopoulos, The Hunters, also set during New year’s Eve and also featuring a crime relative to a hunting party, but with a political subtone lacking in The Circle, if not for the present of Vladimir Putin in the occasional newscasts on television screens.
The Circle has a sense of theme and storyline, with the plot revolving around a patriarchal structure in which a close-knit circle of men quite literally excersises its sense of secrecy, but all in all it is not a film in which the story or the character depth seem to matter, as much as the atmosphere does: the beat-down rural setting, the vast, barren landscapes, the near-dusk lighting construct a two-hours-long film that is primarily a feast of visuals and sounds. Of course, to some, this might come off as a lackluster element, but to those who appreciate a certain type of slow cinema, the probably unintended result is not too dissimilar. The Circle is a film that achieves a sense of artistry above the mere entertainment, and feels timeless in a way that so rarely occurs in modern cinema.
RATING: 4.5/5