The Filmmaker Behind One of the Best Movies of the Century Is Back With Another Harrowing, Provocative Thriller

Movies Fjord Is a Provocative, Harrowing Drama With No Easy Answers By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Dana Stevens? Oct 09, 20263:35 PM Neon Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. The Romanian director Cristian Mungiu specializes in naturalistic dramas whose low-key aesthetic choices—long takes, few close-ups, no use of extradiegetic music—leave it to the viewer to navigate the dense ethical thickets his films set out to explore. Mungiu’s movies often depict people in harrowing circumstances, while maintaining a respectful distance from the drama. Though he’s fascinated by ideological extremes, his own point of view as a filmmaker is intentionally hard to pin down. Mungiu’s latest film, Fjord, won this year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes—Mungiu’s second time taking the festival’s top prize, after the brilliant abortion-themed drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days in 2007. Like that film (which would easily make my Top 10 list for the 21st century to date), Fjord takes on a hot-button issue while going out of its way not to guide the audience’s hand toward any specific button. Fjord may not have the harrowing power of the director’s very best work, but it’s an exacting study of a contemporary social issue that’s rigorous without being clinical. This time around the subject, loosely inspired by real-life events, is the clash of cultural values that can emerge in the wake of immigration. The Gheorghiu family has recently relocated from Bucharest, Romania, to a remote village in northern Norway. Mihai (Sebastian Stan) is Romanian, while his wife Lisbet (Renate Reinsve) is Norwegian-born. They’re returning to her hometown so that her mother can help care for the couple’s five children, who range in age from mid-teens to infancy. The Gheorghius are Christian fundamentalists whose lives are organized around their faith. Though we never learn exactly what religious sect they belong to, it’s established early on that Mihai and Lisbet are strict but loving parents whose children are forbidden to use the internet, play video games, or dance. As the film opens, their oldest child, teenage Elia (Vanessa Ceban) is apologizing to her father for some infraction she’s committed, the nature of which the audience is never shown. “You need to learn to admit when you’re wrong,” he tells her sternly as she gives him a tearful hug. That will prove to be a tough assignment for every character in this movie, child or adult, especially since, as the viewer is soon to find out, the question of who exactly is in the wrong gets increasingly harder to resolve. The Gheorghius enroll their children in the local public school, a seemingly welcoming and progressive institution whose principal is their friendly next-door neighbor Mats (Markus Scarth Tønseth). Mats’ rebellious teen daughter Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olsen) takes a shine—possibly a romantic one—to the pious Elia and persuades her and her younger brother Emmanuel (Jonathan Ciprian Breazu) to sneak out of their house for stealthy late-night joyrides on her family’s motorboat. The family seems to be settling well into their secular but close-knit new community, until the school gym teacher notices some bruises on Elia’s back during wrestling class. It’s never clear that these are the results of parental abuse—earlier on we witness a shoving match between Elia and Noora’s jealous ex-best friend, and the gym class itself seems rough enough to have potentially caused the marks. But Norwegian laws about child abuse are strict enough that within days a representative from the state child welfare office (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) has ordered the placement of not just Elia but all of the Gheorghiu children, including the still-breastfeeding baby, into three different foster homes while the parents’ child-rearing practices are investigated. This setup is established less than an hour into Fjord’s two-and-a-half-hour run time; with pacing that’s deliberate but never drags, Mungiu’s patient camera (the cinematographer is Tudor Vladimir Panduru) observes the repercussions of these events, both within the Gheorghiu family and throughout the broader community. Eventually that scope will expand to include the global religious right, as the outraged Mihai begins to attract a large social-media following protesting what he perceives to be faith-based persecution. During a civil hearing to assess their parental fitness, Mihai and Lisbet are cross-examined not only about their attitudes toward spanking as a form of parental discipline—a practice Mihai defends as a part of his traditional culture—but about their refusal to give their children cellphones and their insistence on daily prayer. Even as you start to believe it’s true that the couple’s conservative beliefs might be harmful to their kids’ development, you find yourself taking their side against the officious child-welfare bureaucrats who seem convinced that a single interview with two confused teenagers—both of whom say that they love their parents and want to return home—constitutes evidence enough to make all five Gheorghiu children wards of the state and possibly put their parents in prison. Sebastian Stan may be most familiar to your average American moviegoer as Captain America’s sidekick–turned–Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes (a role he will be reprising in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday), but he has since made his name as a serious and ambitious actor, delivering a performance of great comic brio as Tommy Lee in the miniseries Pam & Tommy and bringing an unexpected pathos to the thankless role of a young Donald Trump in 2024’s The Apprentice, a role that earned him his first Oscar nomination. Stan spent the first eight years of his life in Romania and subsequently grew up around an extended family of Romanian-speaking immigrants; without knowing the language, I can only say that he switches with utter believability between that language, which Mihai speaks to his family, and the Romanian-accented English he uses to communicate with his Norwegian neighbors. Stan’s resolutely unglamorous performance as Mihai, a soft-spoken but steel-willed man with huge reserves of pride and occasional flashes of frightening anger, is what gives the film its fascinatingly unstable center of gravity, and it’s not hard to see why he might be on his way to nomination No. 2. As for Renate Reinsve, while she doesn’t disappear physically into her role as completely as Stan does into his—she’s still recognizable as the gorgeous, willowy star of The Worst Person in the World and Sentimental Value—Lisbet is a very different character from the kind we’re used to seeing Reinsve play, not a spiky individualist but a devout and dutiful wife and mother. Her big scene, a sit-down with child-welfare authorities during which she gradually comprehends that her whole world is about to be ripped apart, is a master class in acting as reacting, and may very well earn her a second Oscar nod as well. Mungiu’s script economically establishes that, though the Gheorghius’ marriage operates by more or less traditional gender roles, the couple’s bond to each other and to their children is genuine and deep. In the film’s most affecting scene, the camera observes Mihai from behind as he looks out the window at his wife in their driveway, buckling their infant son into his car seat as he’s about to be taken away by a worker for child protective services. Neither the father’s nor the mother’s face is visible during this long take; it’s only through their body language (his rigid stance, her slumping shoulders) that we see how wrenching the moment is for them both. Fjord is less concerned with reconciling the tension between secular and faith-based value systems than with making the audience sit with the fact that even the most nominally progressive modern democracies are constructed around what may be an unbridgeable gulf. Like the beautiful but threatening snowdrifts that cover the mountains around the village—avalanches are frequent enough that the school has a fire drill–like protocol for hustling the kids indoors when the snow starts to slide—the social order Mungiu shows us appears constantly on the verge of collapse. In the film’s final shot, the sacred and the profane seem to converge in an image of quasi-supernatural beauty. You’ll come out of the movie wondering what the filmmaker was asking you to believe about that closing image, and suspecting that his real goal all along was just to keep you asking. Religion The Oscars Film Festivals