Film Reviews: Cristian Mungiu’s ‘Fjord,’ Screening at Cannes

If there were ever a film destined to be mistaken for centrist apologia (if not outright conservative propaganda), it’s Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, the searing social drama that won him his second Palme d’Or. However, its emotional impetus is contradiction, so any conflicted feelings when viewing it through a political prism are not unwarranted. Building on the discomforting courtroom unfurling of RMN—his previous film, about the mechanics of mounting anti-immigrant sentiment—Fjord traces the most delicate, most pliable dynamics of modern democracy, in a tale designed as much to infuriate as to engender difficult introspection.

It is, on its surface, rather simple. A remote, progressive Norwegian town becomes the new home of a staunchly religious couple from Romania: software developer Mihai Gheorghiu (Sebastian Stan) and his Norwegian nurse wife Lisbet (Renate Reinsve). Their strict, evangelical parentage fuels rumors and triggers an investigation by Child Welfare Services when one of their adolescent children shows up to school with unexplained bruises. However, this clash between citizens and the state isn’t merely one of systemic dynamics, but of the unsolvable dilemmas that emanate from ideological skirmishes. If one were to trace the characters’ arcs and trajectories, in a traditional sense, not much changes over the movie’s 146 minutes. However, Mungiu’s controlled form, and his actors’ carefully restrained performances, turn the movie’s thematic plateau into an inescapable minefield of ethical deadlocks.

While its plot bears passing similarity to the didactic Bollywood drama Mrs. Chatterjee vs Norway—a film based on real events—Fjord‘s fiction is engineered (in the most meticulous, technical sense) to seem much more Socratic. However, from its opening images, in which Stan’s balding, imposing patriarch towers menacingly over his children while showing them affection, it becomes apparent that Mungiu is not only drawing from cultural (and perhaps personal) experience, but is molding a peculiar visage meant to both sow doubt and emotionally exploit it. There’s an inflexibility to how the Gheorghius are written, as though they were antonymic embodiments of everything modern Scandinavian society held dear (from socialist values to a self-proclaimed liberation from religious doctrine). And yet, the detailed humanism with which Mungiu carves even these rigid characters turns Fjord from mere thought experiment into a riveting drama tinged with self-aware humor. It’s hard not to guffaw at even the most intense debate between Norwegian secularism and evangelical faith when the tilted crucifix of Norway’s flag flutters in the wind just outside a character’s window, occupying half the frame. Where you’re going can’t be divorced from where you’ve been, so the Romanian Mihai may as well personify Norway’s own entanglements with Christian extremism.

Stan has, of late, become the actor arguably most at odds with his rise to prominence as a cog in the Marvel machine, between his Berlinale Best Actor-winning role in the satire A Different Man and his Oscar-nominated turn as Donald Trump in The Apprentice. With Fjord, he completes an even more perplexing transformation, as a terrifying father whose stillness embodies the strictness of his beliefs, and whose tough love radiates through the screen in eerie hues, even (and especially) in quiet moments. Reinsve, meanwhile, follows her more radiant roles as a modern woman in search of herself in The Worst Person in the World and Sentimental Value (not to mention A Different Man as well) by contrasting a distinctly reserved appearance with the mystery of how exactly she relates to her domineering husband, her five children of various ages, and their culture at large, behind closed doors. We only see what Mungiu wants us to see, as though the film were a court docket, but Mungiu’s lead actors create confidently beguiling dispositions, and in the process, conjure imaginative possibilities sure to instill everything from affection to disdain in the average viewer.

The couple’s older children, Elia (Vanessa Ceban) and Emmanuel (Jonathan Ciprian Breazu), befriend the daughter of their new neighbors, a spry girl named Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olsen), who seems intent on getting them into trouble. Jealousies at school and strange interactions near their respective homes suggest the potential for their friendship to place a wedge between the adolescent siblings and their parents. But before this narrative can come to fruition, observant school staff and the country’s swiftly moving legal system act on circumstantial evidence to take Elia, Emmanuel and their three younger siblings from their parents’ care, on the suspicion of physical abuse.

The Gheorghius’ strict Biblical parenting (in a country of 70 percent non-theists) informs a cultural stereotyping that sits alongside the system’s genuine concerns. However, once these preexisting notions are exposed, Fjord doesn’t seek to dismantle, challenge or reinforce them. They are, instead, a core facet of the movie’s backdrop, existing in a consistent form that imbues the movie’s subsequent court proceedings with completely inevitable predispositions. And yet, this predictability is part and parcel of Mungiu’s approach to constructing a saga where answers, especially easy ones, never present themselves. The drama provides enough hints to ensure you’ll come to quick conclusions about what did or did not transpire, in a strict factual sense. But just as swiftly, the movie widens in thematic scope, in order to broach larger philosophical queries.

It becomes an anxiety-inducing stress test of progressive belief, centering not on the factual “right” or “wrong” of the case, but of egalitarianism itself, and of maintaining democratic liberties when the ones at stake are objectionable, detestable, or even harmful in nature. “My beliefs aren’t on trial,” Mihai states at one point, after having spent much of the movie gladly accepting support from rancid extremists to get his children back. And yet, there’s no avoiding the sense that he’s correct, whether or not his actions and methods ought to be disqualifying.

As the film goes on, one could conjure innumerable principled reasons—as many Norwegian characters do—to see the Gheorghius stripped of their rights as parents, down to the seeming homophobia that trickles down to their young children. However, at the root of democratic belief is an equal application of the law, and measuring these values against their most extreme manifestations is an exercise worth engaging in. The specifics of Fjord, realistic or otherwise, complicate what equality even means, in any nominally progressive society that values wide-ranging multiculturalism. It’s hard not to wonder about (and be bothered by) the open-ended uncertainties Mungiu suggests, about the degree to which personal liberties and beliefs can or should be infringed upon.

Even if there’s a legal or moral correctness to the actions of the state, the very context of the Gheorghius being a minority in Norway—even if their religion fosters fascism elsewhere, like Brazil or the United States—engenders a broad, structural re-orienting of the movie’s drama along David-and-Goliath lines (a comparison even the movie’s more zealous characters make). And in addition to its dimensions of lawfulness and morality, there is also the emotional element, and the human element, portrayed in complex hues by Stan and Reinsve, and enhanced by Mungiu’s roving camera as he seats us alongside them in unbroken takes, as both observers and participants in legal proceedings.

Beyond a point, the frigidity of Mungiu’s signature cool-blue palette is even warmed by Mihai and Lisbet’s multifaceted presence, urging empathy in a direction to which any nominally liberal or leftist viewer might be understandably resistant. For at the core of Fjord isn’t the pursuit of answers, but rather, a confrontation of never-ending questions, about the limits of personal autonomy in a modern civilization that claims itself truly democratic. Even if one believes the state ought to be deputized with these responsibilities—as one very well might after watching Fjord—Mungiu’s lens refracts the self-professed enlightenment of impartiality, to reveal the stalemates inherent to this alleged Utopianism.

Such is the nature of human society. It’s frictional and fractal. Something, some form of hypocrisy or incongruity, is always bound to seep through… but what do you do when you reach that place? What can you do? How do you stay righteous when the greater good involves inevitable harm, no matter where you come down? This is the existential despair in which Mungiu is dealing, and from which the movie’s drama emanates.

Perhaps the nature of belief is that, beyond a point, it’s unshakable, and few minds will be radically changed by even the most controversial court case (let alone a politically loaded Palme recipient). But in the case of Fjord, the film makes it necessary to recognize the cracks in one’s own load-bearing mental, emotional and ethical contours, if only to prevent their eventual breaking.

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