It’s no secret that not all countries are keeping pace with the most populous Western nations when it comes to progress in LGBTQ rights, which makes it especially unfair to criticize a queer movie from one of these countries for feeling outdated. However, I never said I was fair, and the perplexing winner of this year’s Cannes Queer Palm – and Romania’s submission for the Best International Feature Film Oscar – Three Kilometers to the End of the World will likely suffer with overseas audiences because of the sheer familiarity of its miserable social realism. Of course, America and the UK have no shortage of cultural conservatives determined to sour the lives of queer people, but English-language narrative cinema has at least gotten comfortable with spotlighting the voices of the oppressed communities. Director Emanuel Pârvu’s film, on the other hand, is about a gay teenager’s forced coming-out, but very rarely from his own perspective. The director and co-screenwriter Miruna Berescu clearly want to highlight the various contradictions and dark quirks of homophobia but handle it in a manner which leaves its sole gay character to exist as a victim; a story about him in which he functions more as a plot device than a fleshed-out figure.
After being spotted kissing a male tourist in his small village, Adi (Ciprian Chiujdea) is beaten up and has his phone stolen. Naturally, his dad Dragoi (Bogdan Dumitrache) wants repercussions, but after filing a police report, soon finds out the reason behind the violence, and becomes conflicted with how to proceed. The father of the two boys who committed the attack is a loan shark who Dragoi owes money to – and has promised he will drop the debt if Adi promises to drop all charges held against his sons. Meanwhile, Adi keeps getting stopped in his tracks in his attempts to leave the village, with a priest (Adrian Titieni) even convincing his parents to perform an intensive “pray the gay away” style exorcism, which only further complicates the matter of legal proceedings in the background.
Corruption runs rampant in the village, with the police happy to look away and find ways to shut down the investigation if it proves beneficial to them. However, there’s no depth to this portrayal of small-town bureaucracy, with no character allowed to possess any moral complexities despite the moral quandaries presented by the screenplay – characters are blinded by bigotry, or the need to save face within a community where everybody talks behind everyone else’s back, with little to flesh them further beyond those single notes. Pârvu, an actor-turned-director clearly inspired by the gritty social dramas of previous collaborator Cristian Mungiu, does have some fun exposing the peculiarities of these bigoted worldviews; the village priest believes homosexuality can be spread via the COVID vaccine, and the loan shark thinks that news of a single gay resident will lead to an influx of LGBTQ tourists “humping on street corners”. That letting these characters air their most ridiculous, homophobic views counts as levity should probably highlight how the film has little to offer beyond surface level queer misery.
Almost every conversation comes back to the topic of Adi, but the film rarely gives him a chance to speak for himself. How being forced out of the closet would personally affect him outside of his own home – where he’s locked away and at one point tied and gagged in an unintentionally homoerotic religious cleansing ritual – is never verbalized. Pârvu thinks that letting the community routinely wax lyrical about the subject does justice enough to the idea that his life could never be happy if he lived here. And as much as it would be stating the obvious to dive further into this, any approach which doesn’t center the personal anxieties of the queer character is an inherently misguided one.
Perhaps as recently as 20 years ago, Three Kilometers to the End of the World would have been widely viewed as an incisive work of social realism, which confronts the homophobic bigotry in society that is often brushed aside. But now, there’s no dramatic intrigue to this approach, especially one that makes its sole gay character a MacGuffin in his father’s conspiracy drama. It’s hardly the most egregious example of an LGBTQ story being pitched primarily towards a straight audience, but when touching on traumatic material to the extent this does, a little queer perspective wouldn’t have gone amiss.
Grade: C+
This review is from the 2024 BFI London Film Festival. There is no U.S. distribution for Three Kilometers to the End of the World at this time.
