Director: Cristian Mungiu
Stars: Renate Reinsve, Sebastian Stan, Markus Tønseth
Park Chan-wook, Chloe Zhao, Stellan Skarsgård, Demi Moore et al. You have to wonder what was going through the minds of the Cannes jury this past May when they elected to decorate Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord with the laurels of the Palme d’Or. The often-great Romanian director’s last film, R.M.N., was one of the best in competition in 2022, ultimately losing out to Ruben Östlund’s excoriating Triangle of Sadness. Perhaps that loss provoked Mungiu to construct this lopsided and morose slog through the bureaucracies of, err, Norway’s Child Protection services? A shrewd if misguided effort to sculpt something as unnuanced as Östlund? Was there something specific that prompted Mungiu to take this steaming piss over 1,200 miles from his own doorstep? Enduring Fjord, which on a technical level is as coldly competent as anything else in the director’s canon, it is in the aftermath that it truly baffles. The film doesn’t so much settle as sink between the cracks of it’s own making.
We’re in the rural mountainous regions of coastal Norway, where the threat of avalanches hangs heavy over a community that is, ostensibly, prepared for it. Norwegian native Lisbet Gheorghiu (Renate Reinsve) along with her Romanian husband Mihai (Sebastian Stan for some reason) have recently moved their brood of five children there, and they’re integrating well enough, save for a few qualms over the family’s staunchly evangelical faith. Father and daughter Elia (Vanessa Ceba) both tinker with playing hymns on the cafeteria’s inexplicably placed keyboard, an encroachment on the church/state divide that doesn’t go unnoticed in either instance. A furore begins when Elia arrives at school one morning with bruises on her face, neck and shoulder. Child Protection Services are immediately called in to investigate and all four children are removed from parental custody within hours, with the fate of Mihai and Lisbet’s newborn baby hanging in the balance.
What unfurls from here operates within a curious contradiction. I’d call it hand-wringing tabloid hysteria if Mungiu and his actors weren’t committed to such morose, expressionless navel gazing. Flinching at the threat of further repercussions should they not display the appropriate decorum, Mihai and Lisbet submit emotionlessly to the machinations of the state, presented here as all-powerful and condescending, openly prejudiced against the family for their religious fervour. It helps Mihai’s case little that he cagily admits to slapping the children’s backsides, as the family rhetoric includes deeply conservative views on discipline, but the manner in which he acquiesces to having his nuanced language exaggerated in a legal statement is baffling and frustrating. The couple’s relentlessly stiff nature is an iceberg that never thaws, keeping knowing them at arm’s length. They are as broadly caricatured as the relentlessly Machiavellian ‘woke’ left who tear their family apart.
Try as Mungiu does to have this play out at a level bordering the comatose, ridiculousness keeps finding it’s way into the picture. Never more so than at the trial, during which the state prosecutor gets up in Mihai’s face, demanding that he slap him, too, and no one batters an eye. If only the judge had said “I’m going to allow this” we’d be in full SNL skit territory.
The Gheorghius are painted as the meek and powerless victims of a blinkered system throughout, but this is blithely contradicted within the film’s framework. When Mihai grows dissatisfied with how Lisbet is handling the case (a rare emotive expression), he calls on the muscle of the church (depicted here like some kind of mafia) who drum up international support by engaging the radical Christian right in the US, whipping the trial up into (minor) international news. A genuine effort of grassroots power that may, arguably, prove material on the decision ultimately made by the courts. While Mungiu tries to shrug off their seriousness with some silly graffiti (the only time the film comes close to feeling satirical), Fjord comes off as a vehicle for right wing outrage and, at worst, a mea culpa for labyrinthine progressive (a dirty word here) bureaucracies.
Mungiu has a clear affection for creating community powder kegs and using thorny issues of discrimination to peer at the attitudes behind closed doors. Fjord is nominally more successful in this regard, evidencing the hypocrisy of good neighbours who sneer from behind their curtains. Clumsier is an effort to pry into the ethical quandaries of Lisbet’s faith as it pertains to suicide, as she cares also for an elderly gentleman clearly looking to join his long departed wife who died by drowning. This story line is marginalised and unsuccessful, rather like the broader overarching threat of an avalanche (a heavy-handed metaphor for the controversy of the court case) that ultimately proves a non-drama for those accustomed to the environs.
Perhaps this is the movie’s limited message; that Norway is conditioned to it’s climate and through compliance immune to such threats… so long as they play by the indoctrinated rules. Mungiu’s dull, anti-dramatic tendencies, however, paint all sides as basically terrible, with the exception of gay teens, who are destined for heartache and division.
Great.
Honestly the best thing about the film’s UK release is that it’s distributor Picturehouse will likely mishandle it and Fjord will disappear into obscurity.
