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‘Three Kilometers to the End of the World’ Review: A Portrait of a Small Romanian Village, Made Smaller Still by Prejudice
In 'Three Kilometers to the End of the World,' Emanuel Pârvu examines the fallout of a homophobic assault, but oddly shortchanges the victim.
A rural village in thrall to the Romanian Orthodox Church proves as hostile an environment as you’d expect for a closeted gay teen in writer-director Emanuel Pârvu’s claustrophobic study of personal and institutional prejudice closing in on a community misfit: If the breeze would just die down for a second, you might hear Adi’s inner clock tensely counting down his slim shot at freedom. An accomplished actor now making his third feature behind the camera, Pârvu is well-versed in the formal and thematic hallmarks of Romanian New Wave cinema, having previously been directed by the likes of Cristian Mungiu (“Graduation”), Cãlin Peter Netzer (“Familiar”) and Bogdan George Apetri (“Miracle”). That’s certainly how Adi (Ciprian Chiujdea) feels about his home village in the Danube Delta — an attractively tangled patchwork of farmland, waterways and massed, swaying reeds, shot by Silviu Stavilă in sunburnt widescreen compositions that don’t entirely mask its more desolate qualities.
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