Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu has deep compassion for characters who face dehumanizing institutions. In 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, an ordinary young woman tries to seek an illegal abortion at the end of the Nicolae Ceaușescu regime, while Beyond the Hills looks at how the Eastern Orthodox attempt an exorcism on someone who simply needs mental health care. His latest film, the Palme d’Or-winning Fjord, includes Romanian characters, but for the first time Mungiu broadens his critique beyond his home country. This time he also critiques progressivism in Western Europe, where the state purports to know better than families. The exacting realism that defines his work is still apparent, complete with strong performances, only time there is also a broader allegorical quality to boot. Staggering and provocative, Fjord is the kind of movie where viewers cannot think about it without first considering their personal baggage.
An unrecognizable Sebastian Stan stars as Mihai Gheorghiu, an engineer who relocates from Romania to a small town in Norway with his wife, Lisbet (Renate Reinsve), and their children. The secular community welcomes him, although their values clash almost immediately. Mihai and Lisbet are devout Christians, active in the nearby church, and their harsh discipline style reflects that background. Their children, Elia (Vanessa Ceban) and Emmanuel (Jonathan Ciprian Breazu), are matter-of-fact about how their parents raise them, and at one point an educator at their secular school overhears them discuss the corporal punishment they receive. After some misgivings, the school’s headmaster Mats (Markus Scarth Tønseth) contacts child services, a decision that sparks a chain of events that puts the children in foster homes. Left with little recourse, Mihai and Lisbet launch a legal inquiry where their values, not their fitness as parents, are put on trial.
Fjord avoids the histrionics that you might expect from a courtroom thriller, and Mungiu instead looks for the cumulative power of smaller moments. There is an early scene where Mihai corrects his colleagues about the pronunciation of his last name—you can sense his hostility—and another where he plays “Amazing Grace” on the piano at the school until other adults firmly tell him to stop. At each focal point, you can see the impasse between Mihai and the others. He thinks the Norwegians judge him for being backward, leading to simmering resentment, while Mats and the others act like they know better because the state supports their point of view. Some critics accuse Fjord of overstating its hand, making the Norwegian characters unsympathetic masters of passive aggression, but Mungiu’s early films show his sense of empathy is too broad for that. Every adult is right in this film, which is to say that every adult is also wrong, so it can be like a cinematic Rorschach test.
Two key characters show they are capable of thinking past the comfort of their preferred institutions. Lisa Carlehed plays Mats’ wife, Mia, who becomes friendly with Lisbet and ultimately becomes their defense attorney. But before Lisbet asks Mia to take her case, Mia’s daughter, Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olsen), spends a lot of time with Elia and Emmanual, striking up a friendship that is more open and tolerant than anything that happens with the older generation. Their subplot is fascinating, rich with unspoken desire, and how it resolves again reveals Mungiu’s rigorous approach to his material. If most adults and parents are too entrenched to see beyond their worldview, then younger people have no choice but to figure things out for themselves. An irony lost on Mihai and Mats the headmaster is how they are good parents, albeit in opposite ways, with more in common than they realize.
Mungiu is part of the Romanian New Wave, a filmmaking style that favors natural light and little music to heighten the realism, so the actors here reflect that approach. Most of Fjord is in Norwegian and English, with some spoken Romanian, but Mungiu’s formal sensibilities can adapt to another country easily. Stan’s brilliant performance as Mihai relies on restraint and internalized emotion, rather than exploding in anger (longtime fans may not realize Stan was born in Romania, living in the country until he was 8). Reinsve also plays against type as Lisbet, a reserved woman of deep passion who is torn between faith, family, and country. Still, it is the child actors who are the most affecting because they have no choice but to silently watch their community squabble. In particular, Noora and Elia’s arc from resignation to self-possessed confidence has more wisdom and nuance than most modern coming-of-age stories.
Since Fjord invites viewers to reflect on their own background, I would be remiss not to mention my own. Like Mihai, my late father was an engineer from Romania who emigrated, and sometimes bristled with how people do things in his adopted country. My dad was not religious, but he also had a stern parenting style where there was deliberate, severe quality in how he administered punishment, as well as affection. He and Mihai even looked kind of alike, which is to say a Hollywood hunk like Stan is slumming it a little while he looks like me. Maybe that background meant I was naturally sympathetic toward the Gheorghius, just like how the child of a schoolmaster might find themselves siding with Mats, a good man who thinks little about the bureaucratic mess he made.
Fjord has a way of getting under your skin emotionally and intellectually, to the point where it could be an allegory about anything from the European immigration crisis to the limits of English as a shared tongue. Mihai never thinks he has done anything wrong, freely admitting to a “slap on the butt” as a form of discipline. So much drama hinges on whether that repeated line merits child abuse, to the point where you cannot help but wonder whether the words “spanking” and “whupping” could clear the legal and linguistic minefield where Mihai and the others find themselves. Then again, even with maximum fluency of all three spoken languages, these characters are so dug into their own camps that they would find something—anything, really—to avoid common ground. You don’t have to venture far to find someone that stubborn. Just look in the mirror.
Fjord (R, 146 mins.) opens in theaters on Oct. 22.
