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 3rd 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.
