‘Three Kilometers To The End Of The World’ Review: Emanuel Parvu’s Drama An Expansive Tale Of Corruption And Lies – Cannes Film Festival

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When Adi (Ciprian Chiujdea) is beaten up outside the one dance club in the village where he grew up, his father takes up the cudgels, chivvying the local police chief into finding out who did it.

It would be obvious enough to anyone but dad Dragoi (Bogdan Dumitrache) that this is a straight-up case of gay-bashing, which would seem to signal that Emanuel Parvu’s Cannes Competition title Three Kilometers to the End of the World, a slice of Romanian life, will be a worthy but familiar story of a boy’s coming out to a hostile world.

Indeed, bloodied Adi with his black eyes and traumatic lesions is soon being punished, locked in his room by his parents as his desperate mother prays to the icons on the wall for guidance.

We have undoubtedly been down this donkey-track before. Nothing in a small village, however, happens in isolation. The beating has points of connection with so many aspects of community life and its power brokers – the police chief on the brink of retirement, the local property king whose sons do the bashing and to whom Dragoi owes a sum of money he has no hope of pulling together, the priest whose authority derives from the faithful and the fearful – that Parvu’s film becomes something like an emotional map of the community.  RELATED: Cannes Film Festival Photos Instead of roads and houses, it shows where friendship, mutual support and favors exchanged have rotted into the muck of corruption.