The gifted Romanian writer-director Cristian Mungiu makes tense realist thrillers that lay bare his country's history of corruption and authoritarianism. In Beyond the Hills, he took aim at intolerance within the Romanian Orthodox Church. In his 2007 masterpiece, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, he laid bare the cruelties of the communist dictatorship in the late 1980s. That film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and announced Mungiu as a major international talent.
A few months ago, Mungiu won a second Palme d'Or for his new drama, Fjord, which, in many ways, marks something of a departure. It's his first movie shot outside Romania, but even in a fresh setting, his eye for institutional oppression and hypocrisy is as sharp as ever.
Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve give superb performances as a married couple, Mihai and Lisbet Gheorghiu, who have just moved from Romania to a small town nestled among the fjords and mountains of Norway. They have five children; the oldest is in high school, the youngest still in diapers. They're also strictly observant Christians. In one scene, which features mostly English and some Romanian dialogue, they're singing hymns at home with some church friends when they get a visit from a friendly neighbor, Mia, and her teenage daughter, Noora.
The townspeople are welcoming at first, and Mungiu uses wide shots and long takes to immerse us in this open, bustling community. But things get unfriendly fast for the Gheorghius. One day, a school administrator notices that their eldest daughter, Elia, has bruises on her back, and overhears her and her brother talking about having been disciplined by their parents. A call is made to Child Protective Services, and with dizzying speed, the five Gheorghiu children — including the baby — are taken away from their parents and placed in foster care.
The rest of the film follows Mihai and Lisbet's efforts to get their kids back, pitting them against an unyielding Norwegian legal system. In the testimonies that emerge, we learn that one of their children had expressed anti-LGBTQ opinions in class. This raises the question of whether the Gheorghius were targeted for abusing their children, which they vehemently deny, or for refusing to adopt the progressive, secular-humanist values of their new home country.
For all the acclaim and awards it's received, Fjord has proven remarkably divisive for a Mungiu movie. Although the story was inspired by a widely publicized case from 2015, involving a Romanian Norwegian family that endured a similar ordeal, some critics have accused the film of reducing the European welfare state to a straw-man villain — an overreaching government entity that denies parents due process. Others have claimed that such responses merely prove Mungiu's point about the intolerance of the left and how tribalism and racial and religious discrimination can arise even in ostensibly inclusive communities.
For my part, I found Fjord to be a blatantly yet skillfully manipulative drama that craftily withholds as much information as it reveals. Mungiu traffics in ambiguity, sometimes to the point of coyness. The episodes of alleged physical abuse are strategically obscured or kept off-screen. A plausible alternate explanation for Elia's bruises emerges, but it's never confirmed. Fascinatingly, the kids themselves never come right out and say whether they've been physically abused, and their silence on the matter feels dramatically evasive — but also, from a parent's perspective, eerily fitting. It's as if the film were saying that, with or without state interference, our children begin to become unknowable, drifting away from us, the moment they're born.
I thought a lot about my own kids while watching Fjord and the outrage I'd feel if they were taken away from me. I also sifted through my complicated feelings about my own distant evangelical-Christian upbringing. Stan and Reinsve's performances, full of tightly controlled sorrow and fury, make it easy to feel for Mihai and Lisbet, and to believe that they're genuinely good, loving parents, whether or not you share the rigidity of their beliefs.
And I suspect that, deep down, it's that rigidity that Mungiu takes the most issue with. It's no accident that the most sympathetic character here is that friendly neighbor, Mia, who turns out to be an attorney and agrees to represent the parents in court, noting, at one point, that she feels a moral obligation to defend the minority. Mia, for her part, isn't religious. Yet she's one of the few characters here who fully embraces the biblical commandment to love thy neighbor.
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