Business Finance Media Technology Policy Wealth Insights Interviews

Art Art Fairs Art Market Art Reviews Auctions Galleries Museums Interviews

Lifestyle Nightlife & Dining Style Travel Interviews

Power Lists Nightlife & Dining Art A.I. PR

About About Observer Advertise With Us Reprints

Screening at Cannes: Cristian Mungiu’s ‘Fjord’

Awarded the prestigious Palme d’Or, this unnerving Romanian social drama stress-tests the limits of liberty.

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.

Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter

Thank you for signing up!

By clicking submit, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime.

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........

© Observer