Cristina Flutur

Alina wants to be loved, and Voichita's own wishes can seem almost incidental to that need. In Cristian Mungiu's Beyond the Hills (2012), Cristina Flutur makes this difficult woman worth staying with, even when we want her to stop asking. We found her longing painful to watch because her insistence leaves so little room for the person she wants affection from. Flutur does not make the demands less wearing to secure our sympathy. She makes it hard to dismiss the woman making them.

After this film debut, she worked in French-language television in Resistance (2014) and took her first English-language feature role in Grain (2017). There is Romanian feature work too, including Hawaii (2017). That widening of the career is worth noting, though Alina remains the performance on which our enthusiasm rests. She prefers discovering a character through silence and personal connection to talking at length with a director. It makes sense of a performance that asks us to take Alina's feelings seriously before judging what she does with them.

Cosmina Stratan's Voichita matters just as much to what works in Mungiu's film. Stratan gives her enough feeling that she never becomes merely the woman standing in Alina's way. The two actors keep the relationship difficult without reducing it to a contest between opposing beliefs. When the discussion of faith threatens to turn the women into examples, their performances bring us back to two people whose wishes cannot both come first.

The middle section of Beyond the Hills repeats itself, and the strength of the acting does not make every repetition necessary. That is a reservation about Mungiu's pacing, not a request for Flutur to make Alina more agreeable. The performance would lose much of its force if she did. Start here, provided a patient, painful monastery drama is the sort of evening you want.