James Y. Lee
Cristian Mungiu is certainly no stranger to the corruption endemic to Romania—look no further than the abortion-cinema-defining 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, or the educational descent into the country’s underbelly in 2016’s Graduation. Rarely, however, has his observational lens expanded outwards into its neighboring countries to create a truly intersectional piece he can train his incisive eye for commentary on. His neorealist pressure cookers have been so deeply contained in his insight on Romania’s failings that it almost feels like a silent threat to the wider cinematic community for him to venture beyond its borders. Will he carry over into other countries the unfettered honesty and artistically confrontational attitude he’s developed from staring down the most rotten corners of Romanian society and politics? Will he pry these other lands with the same force and surgical precision he has for the fraught historical and social tribulations of his motherland? To date, Fjord, Mungiu’s latest, and the film that won him his second Palme d’Or, is the closest we’ve come to receiving a firm “yes.”
Cristian Mungiu feels like a director abnormally well-equipped to join his contemporaries in flaying open the anxieties of our dire present hour. Even the Cannes jury president this past year, none other than No Other Choice‘s own Park Chan-wook, can firmly count himself among this group—of which numerous directors have stepped up to the plate to take a swing at their cinematic view on how much worse the world has become, and speculating on how we can either flourish or flounder from here. To that end, perhaps the most quietly indicative scene in Fjord is an anger-management class midway through the film, where a counselor guides several parents through many phrases, one of which is, “Anger heals trauma.”
There in that class, sitting among that group of parents, begrudgingly following along with some breathing exercises, is Mihai Gheorghiu (Sebastian Stan), who’s been placed there as part of a regimen to reclaim his children, who’ve all been taken into custody by Norway’s Child Protection services. Blink, and you’ll miss it, but that class is a tangible pointer to a part of Fjord‘s litany of critiques, namely of how vengeful rage can consume anyone wanting to prevent trauma and abuse, and that the draconian ideological oversight that results from that rage is a danger to the citizens living beneath it, regardless of that ideology’s moral character.
As a bit of a backtrack, the Gheorghius are a mixed family of Romanians and Norwegians, specifically via the marriage of Mihai and Lisbet (Renate Reinsve). They’re also based on the real-life Romanian Bodnariu family, whose children were taken from them by child protection authorities in Norway over concerns of abuse. Mihai was born and raised in Romania, and Lisbet is from Norway; the two of them now have five children together and are both in alignment with their fervent beliefs in fundamentalist Christianity.
Following the death of Mihai’s parents, the entire family uprooted their lives in Romania to live in Norway—a place where Lisbet has more familiarity, and a country with functional enough educational and healthcare systems where they can allow their children to meaningfully thrive. The catch is that the small pier-side town that they’ve moved into, where everyone who attends and runs the local school are neighbors and family friends, is made up almost entirely of secular progressives. But for now, as the Gheorghius—including their adolescent eldest children, Elia (Vanessa Ceban) and Emmanuel (Jonathan Ciprian Breazu)—integrate into the local community, their beliefs haven’t yet proven to be a problem.
That is, until one day, when Elia walks into school and several teachers notice that a red mark is on her left cheek, and her shirt covers a number of bruises. These teachers are well-connected with each other, including school administrator Mats (Markus Tønseth), student counselor Frida (Lisa Loven Kongsli), and Child Protection officer Gunda (Ellen Dorrit Petersen)—and word travels fast among them. The first, immensely drastic step they take to address what they believe is a grave matter of child abuse is to immediately bring in Child Protection to effectively confiscate the Gheorghius’ children to initiate an investigation, and Lisbet is the first to hear the news. She’s already indignantly hesitant about participating in this investigation up until Gunda reveals to her that, yes, they intend on taking every single one of the Gheorghius’ children into custody—and that includes their infant newborn, at which point Lisbet and Mihai begin to mount a legal defense, helped by the representation of Mats’s wife, Mia (Lisa Carlehed), who defends them not exclusively for their beliefs, but à la Voltaire, the right to express their beliefs.
As it gradually becomes clear that Fjord is barreling its way towards becoming a courtroom drama, a slow accumulation of facts and details emerges, most of which wind up returning with a vengeance to the Gheorghius, who find themselves under an abusive system that wields a moral cudgel of left-leaning absolutism. But the Gheorghius are not blameless people, as their Christian faith sees them running their household with an iron fist. When Noora (Henrikke Lund Olsen), Mats and Mia’s rebelliously troubled and occasionally self-harming daughter, regularly sneaks out of the house at night, she finds that in the process of inviting Elia and Emmanuel to join her, they’re extremely reluctant to leave the house so late at all.
Through their ensuing friendship, we find that Elia and Emmanuel lead hermetically sealed lives, details of which eventually become cultural talking points denouncing the Gheorghius. They’re not allowed internet access or to watch YouTube; their incentives and punishments are rigidly counted out via a points system, and even in Fjord‘s very first scene, we watch as they’re holding tight to Lisbet, seemingly having just been punished by Mihai, who warns them that they need to learn the difference between right and wrong.
Yet, indeed, the line between the two is not so clear. One of the most frequently litigated talking points in the investigation is the severity of Mihai and Lisbet’s physical punishments against their children. No doubt exists in the film that they slap their children, at the very least as a form of scolding—but a lingering question floats throughout the film of whether Child Protection is going too far when they label such punishment as lashings, beatings, and physical abuse. Is that line ever truly drawn over the course of the film? Is that a judgment that the audience winds up having to make for themselves, rather than the actual systems and individuals present in the film’s text? Mungiu obscures the visible, material action of the parents’ physical punishment save for one crucial, ambiguous, and litigiously interrogated moment of concern from Lisbet involving safety around a boiling pot of water. The case gets even further complicated when outside influence invited from Romania starts to broil a viral online culture war that draws the ire of uninformed citizens protesting the trial’s existence.
Everyone in Fjord has made up their mind about the beliefs they have—which functions well for Mungiu’s all-observing ethos here. Cristian Mungiu is clearly not expressing centrist views, nor is he using his art for conservative apologia—the rest of his filmography can capably dispel any notion of that from uncharitable viewers wanting Fjord to wholly validate their viewpoints. However, is there room to go further here? Ultimately, this film wants to be an anthropological deconstruction of how the left perceives both religious conservatives and themselves. Yet Fjord risks succumbing too much to the cold touch of objectivity in the process, a screed against political purism that too confidently wears the veil of emotionally detached vérité drama, laden with long-takes in predictably pragmatic court proceedings and handheld tracking shots of spontaneous yet meticulous composition.
It may well be a purposeful choice that Fjord uses colder tones and color grading to gorgeously portray the winters of Norway in nearly the same way that Spike Lee amplified warmer tones to imbue Do the Right Thing with palpable summer heat. Yet that frigidity risks immobilizing the film’s ideas and themes with the frostbite of dramatic and emotional inertia. At points, Mungiu feels like he plays his cards too safe and mercifully with the Gheorghius while trying to use formal omission and discretion to keep veiled in ambiguity the most despicable of their accused offenses. Meanwhile, the institutional and educational forces trying to protect the Gheorghius’ children frequently read as too insincere about their intentions, in a way that might prevent earnest identification with their ostensibly progressive cause, however mishandled and abused in execution it becomes.
Still, it’s a productive narrative challenge to stare down those we’ve come to politically deem our enemy and find things among them that we identify with; the same goes for seeing those we deem our allies and recognizing within them a base, vengeful rage against the oppressor that political power, not unlike Norway’s, will never be able to resolve. In the end, Fjord‘s greatest source of bite and discomfort is found in the consequences of all this on the children at the film’s center. It shows a world in which Noora, Elia, and Emmanuel could learn so much from each other in ways that all of their parents could never provide—about both themselves and the transitional period of life they find themselves in.
But the short-sightedness of the adults that surround them, and the petty squabbles they enter, rationalized away as noble proceedings in the name of the law, sever any vestige of the friendship they could share. Fjord‘s pointed final image is a subtle yet eye-opening indicator that something has been passed along, that they have found a way to truly connect, but that it might now be too late to turn back. It is the most quietly tragic scene in a film full of heated arguments and venomous debate, because it is one of the few complete acknowledgements that Mungiu gives of how these political divides are what may, more than anything else, do the most harm to our children’s futures.
