Mats is trying to break the Nordic ice by joking about vampires, but the gag is lost on Mihai, a devout Christian who sees paternity as a cross to bear, and his faith as a cudgel to wield in a daily crusade against malign progressive forces. These include YouTube, which is banned in his home, much to the shock of the extremely online children next door, who retreat nightly into their iPad playlists. Lisbet, who works as a nurse in an elder-care facility, appears more moderate than her husband. She’s a genuinely kind, considerate person, who is skilled at her job and possesses a lovely bedside manner. Still, she can’t help sneaking a crucifix, unsolicited, into the casket of a recently deceased patient.
From there, Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s film mutates fully from a modern, mirthless comedy of manners to full-on horror show, with Norway’s child protective services unit descending on the Gheorghius’ modest home and taking their children away until such time as their parents can mount a legal defense. Their first lawyer is so appalled by Mihai’s bossy attitude that she quits. Her replacement, Mia (Lisa Carlehed), is Mats’s wife, who tries to dampen her own skepticism about the pious interlopers and their ideas about what it means to lay on hands.
From his own perch on the proverbial fence, Mungiu tries to see the big picture. “If you have a mindset of fundamentalism, it’s not such a big difference between right-wing and left-wing fundamentalism,” he said at Cannes, implying a shared continuum of radicalization. The movie’s mindset is oh-so-equanimous; it’s just asking questions. Such as: whether the secular Norwegian humanists, with their meticulous procedures and concern-trolling protocols, are genuine guardian angels or bloodsuckers? And is Mihai—who admits under interrogation to giving his children the odd slap on the butt, but also worries he’s being misquoted, on the record and in an adopted language—a true fire-and-brimstone monster from the Old World? Or is he a victim being impaled on the stake of political correctness? “They never had Communism,” scoffs a weathered, battle-weary Romanian official, who gets called as institutional heavy artillery once news of the Gheorghius’ plight breaks containment. He knows overreach; in a movie filled with selectively deployed euphemisms and double-talk, this old hand speaks in the cracked voice of historical—if not moral—authority.
Big ones, as it turns out. Fjord took the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May and is already being earmarked for possible Oscars beyond the foreign-language category, as Parasite, Drive My Car, and Anatomy of a Fall were before it. The latter is the real precedent here; like Justine Triet’s 2023 film, Fjord finally adopts the structure of a courtroom drama, one pitting Norway’s bureaucracy against a defiant clan of outsiders. There are, inevitably, plot twists, surprise witnesses, and impassioned testimonies; crucially, the onus of judgment—legal and otherwise—is placed on the audience. We’re privy to more evidence about the case and how the Gheorghius operate behind closed doors than the presiding judge, but only just barely. The real subject of Mungiu’s script, beyond all the aforementioned topical maladies, is—wait for it—the elasticity of truth, and how there are two sides to every story, whether or not they’re created or perceived equally.
Feeling good about feeling bad, to the point of getting off on melancholy, is a hallmark of contemporary European art house cinema. Mungiu is a master of the form. Since his first Palme in 2007 for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a pressurized portrait of a student trying to get a back-alley abortion in the waning days of the Ceauşescu regime, the Romanian director has honed his style to a fine point. Mungiu is a staunch realist who favors spare, unvarnished compositions and quotidian scenarios; his preferred form of punctuation is the pregnant pause.
There are other on-the-nose moments, like an early allusion to an impending avalanche and later the loaded image of a senior citizen in a wheelchair, gazing out at the harbor, hoping to topple in. These awkward moves contrast with the nearly flawless work of the actors, starting with Stan, who doesn’t just disappear into the role (something he didn’t quite manage as Donald Trump in The Apprentice) but captures a withdrawn nature that comes off as authentic. Because of the way Mungiu parcels out information, Mihai is simultaneously the film’s protagonist and its most mysterious figure; he stridently voices his opinions, but we rarely if ever see the action from his point of view. There’s a similarly adept conceptual trick in Reinsve’s performance as Lisbet, which suggests a woman caught intractably between righteousness and denial.
Mungiu is determined to maintain an appearance of objectivity, even as he creates a series of contrived escalations. There’s a difference between diagramming the problems of characters trapped by their class positions and moving them around like pieces on a chessboard, and Mungiu tends to do the latter. He is clumsy in his handling of the contrast between the Gheorghius’ tense but tight-knit family dynamics and Mats’s implied coddling of his own moody teenage daughter Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olsen). When Mats loses his patience with her at the dinner table and bangs his fist, like Mihai, the scene is staged for our benefit, as a gotcha moment: Look who’s the hotheaded authoritarian now. Mihai, meanwhile, is not as bad as he’s made out to be: He seethes and copes without definitively crossing any lines, at least on our watch. The film drapes these characters in ambiguity, less out of open-mindedness and more as a way of quietly flattering certain factions—like, say, sophisticated viewers who see themselves as hovering above the fray, or reactionaries unduly pleased to see social workers presented, however ambivalently, as stooges of totalitarianism.
It’s not quite a spoiler to say that the forecast avalanche arrives before the end of Fjord; Mungiu treats it conspicuously as an anticlimax and an indicator of other, less visible things being dislodged. By only barely disguising his metaphors, he stakes his claim to art-cinema Valhalla, and yet the final act leaves the machinery exposed, with a shameless coda that finds Noora racing against time to catch a ferry out of town. Her long-repressed parting words are predictable, as is the fact that they’re lost on the breeze; what we have here, the film says, is a failure to communicate. Mungiu might mean for Fjord to cut through the noise and register as a howl into the void, but it’s finally more like an echo chamber: loud and discombobulating, spacious and hollow.
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