‘You Don’t Belong Here’ Review: A Potentially Involving Story Is Weakened by Airless Dialogue and a Misguided Finale

Florin Şerban’s “You Don’t Belong Here” opens with great promise and finishes with a stupefyingly misguided coda: The lengthy minutes in between are rigorously filmed and sharply observed, but would have benefited enormously if the director wasn’t also the producer, writer and editor. Airless pauses between nearly every line of dialogue and a mostly fixed camera allergic to close-ups sink this potentially intriguing story of an upright surgeon in a small city discovering that his teenage son is a racist milksop who killed a Roma man. The static visuals have a certain pedagogical function indicative of scrupulous honesty — no tricks or cuts will interpose on this supposed truthfulness — but the oddly unnatural spaces between every sentence have an artificiality that undercuts the claim to exacting realism. It’s an odd choice from Şerban, whose Berlinale-award 2010 debut “If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle” had a genuinely lively authenticity.

Things start auspiciously with Mahler’s 3^rd Symphony accompanying shots of the western city of Reșița, the grand music acting as a counterpoint to the town’s anodyne panorama, suggesting that even in such a nondescript place, something beautiful can exist. That idea is quickly shattered when a stream of masked bike riders armed with baseball bats slap “You Don’t Belong Here” stickers on the cars of the Roma community that they then vandalize. When a man comes out to stop them, he’s beaten to death.

The next morning, Dr. Marius (Adrian Văncică) discovers that some Roma went on a rampage in the hospital morgue, trying to claim the dead man’s body. That same day, the surgeon’s teenage son Ioan (Teodor Butănescu) goes to the school nurse asking to be seen anonymously to check on major bruising he claims to have gotten when he fell off his bike. In a very short time, the story is clearly demarcated, allowing Şerban to focus on character.

Marius, approaching 50, is a big doctor in this provincial city, not just a surgeon but the director of the hospital, and a man who prides himself on his directness and honesty. Given how cold he is with most of the people around him, it’s surprising he has a decent bedside manner, but there’s clearly a generational divide between him and junior doctor Tudor (Tudor Vîrgă), who goes out of his way to thank the nursing staff following surgery. For Marius’ friend, police chief Silviu (Alex Conovaru), such solicitude is weak and unmanly.

That evening, following a threatening encounter with the dead man’s son (Izdrailă Janir), Marius meets his lover Dana (Cristina Richter), and in a lengthy conversation — more like a monologue à la Nuri Bilge Ceylan — he explains that important men like himself need to crack the whip so others will learn how to behave. “I need to be mean,” he explains, before then revealing his insecurities: “What if I’m not as great as I think I am?” He knows he’s a just person, but what if that’s all? The scene is the only one with some honest introspection and also one of the few times when Marius shows any vulnerability, though the truth is, he’s largely dead inside despite later declarations that his son is his entire world.

Had Şerban shown even an iota of that father-son love, the film could have professed some kind of emotional core, but what’s seen on screen are people devoid of affection, and only when Marius’s hardened exterior crumbles on learning that Ioan is suspected of murder does the viewer extend begrudging sympathy to the man. (Though when he admits to not feeling love for Dana, that sympathy goes down another notch.) The problem isn’t the characterization, since the surgeon is extremely well drawn and Văncică’s performance picks up on both the overall inner emptiness and the yearning for something more. What really hampers “You Don’t Belong Here” is the frigid mise-en-scène.

Every scene feels inert, and for reasons best known to Şerban, Liviu Mãrghidan’s camera keeps a distance from the characters, making us cold voyeurs unable to get near anyone. At least we regularly see Văncică’s face, unlike Butănescu’s, shot obliquely or in shadow, his perpetual downcast posture making him nothing more than an empty cypher, a babyish teen destined to disappoint any parent. Equally unclear is why every line of dialogue has to have a pause before the next character responds; it’s just one of several directorial and script choices, like the truly unfortunate ending, that will leave audiences wondering how much better the story could have been had a producer and editor cracked the whip that Marius boasts about.