A homeless man, dressed in tattered clothes and shouting out swear words at random, packs trash into a carryall as he lurches along the leaf-strewn paths of a forlorn amusement park, whose chief attraction is clunky, animatronic dinosaurs.

When he leaves the park and walks into the city of Cluj, in northwestern Romania, he passes one boxy new apartment building after another, some finished, others under construction, but which in their sheer number and size dominate the landscape.

For a brief moment, it looks like Romanian director Radu Jude’s “Kontinental ’25”, a contender for the Berlinale’s Golden Bear prize, and filmed entirely on an Apple iPhone 15, may be a surrealist comedy fantasy. There are laughs to be had as the homeless Ion (Gabriel Spahiu) approaches people in swanky cafes asking for work, then asking for money and cursing when he comes up empty-handed.

Instead it is a story about homelessness, predatory property development and ethnic divides in Cluj, which was called Kolozsvár before it was separated from Hungary in the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War One.

“It’s a film about the moral crisis — and I hate films about the moral crisis,” Jude, who won the 2021 Golden Bear for “Bad Luck Banging, Or Loony Porn”, about a couple whose private sex video gets released onto the Internet, told a press conference. “But here I think it’s an interesting moral cry.”

The person who wrestles with Jude’s moral dilemma is Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), an ethnic Hungarian who used to be a law lecturer but gave that up to become a bailiff. Why she left academia is unclear, but her bailiff job provides the steady income she and her husband needed to buy an apartment in a city where property prices are soaring sky high.

Ion, despite appearances, is not completely homeless but is soon to be. He is a former renowned Romanian athlete, turned alcoholic, who is squatting in the boiler room of a building that is to be demolished to give way to a luxury building called the Kontinental.

Orsolya, on a second visit after having worked behind the scenes to get Ion a month’s reprieve, arrives with gendarmes to enforce an eviction order obtained by an Austrian property developer. She gives him 20 minutes to pack and her team goes away to leave him in peace. When they return, Ion has committed suicide by wrapping wire around his neck, attaching it to a radiator and pulling with all his strength to strangle himself.

The death unnerves and haunts Orsolya, who felt she was doing everything possible to find Ion a place in a shelter. But whenever she tells a friend about it, looking for sympathy, they instead marvel at how he was able to kill himself with wires fastened to a radiator. Her friend Daria (Oana Mardare) says she has a revulsion to homeless people while her mother (Annamária Biluska) says her daughter has caught “the Romanian always complaining virus’.” Meanwhile Romanian nationalists in online posts accuse Orsolya of having caused the death of a onetime national hero.

Devastated by Ion’s death, and the online abuse, Orsolya takes time off from work and postpones her departure on a family holiday to Greece, leaving her husband and two children to precede her.

She is so rattled that when she runs into Fred (an energetic and charming Adonis Tanta), a much younger former law student who is working as a bicycle delivery rider, she abandons her moral compass. They meet for drinks at a cinema bar, where she drinks far too much wine and ends up having sex with him in a park.

It is to be a one-night fling. Orsolya pulls herself together and makes plans to join her husband and children in Greece. She will manage that human feat of healing from emotional or physical wounds and carrying on with life — even if Ion couldn’t.

Cluj, on the other hand, looks unlikely to do so. The film briefly shows a few of the handsome, Austro-Hungarian-era buildings that give the city centre a touch of old-world charm. The film’s closing shots reprieve the opening scene with views of one new apartment building after another, generic and “Chinese”, as they have been labelled by Orsolya.

Jude has said his film’s title is a reference to Italian director Roberto Rossellini’s “Europa ’51” about a woman whose efforts to do good for people in desperate straits run afoul of regulations and lead to her being confined in a mental institution. From the looks of it, Jude is not expecting a better outcome from Orsolya’s efforts, or anyone else’s, in Cluj.

— By Michael Roddy