In Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, a Romanian family resettling in Norway faces a culture clash that exposes the limits of acceptance in a purportedly progressive community. Mungiu, the celebrated Romanian writer-director whose incisive films have explored the spoils of abortion under communism (4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days), blind dogma (Beyond the Hills), corruption (Graduation) and xenophobia (R.M.N.), this time mounts a trenchant critique of modern society, one in which progressive social mores all but doom a “traditional” family.
With Mungiu’s finely honed lens for social-order breakdowns, the film, his first made abroad, takes unmistakable aim at progressive fundamentalism with a scathing dose of Ken Loach government agency indictment. At the center here is a dubious accusation of child endangerment and intervention of merciless, draconian social services. But the real agenda is the persecution of “outsider” beliefs and an unmistakable statement about what the filmmaker believes to be rabid fundamentalist overreach and “othering” by supposed do-gooder liberals.
The winner of this year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes, Sebastian Stan (The Apprentice) and Renata Reinsve (Sentimental Value) star as devout parents raising their children in a “traditional” household, and the in the film’s opening, father Mihai Gheorghiu’s (Stan) command-and-control scolding of the pair’s teen daughter Elia (Vanessa Ciban) sets the tone for the family dynamic—one of measured patriarchal command and control; mother Lisbet (Reinsve), a Norwegian native returning to her homeland with the family she and Mihai have raised to-date in Bucharest, is deferential.
Mihai, an accomplished aeronautical engineer, takes a lower-level IT job at the local school and Lisbet finds work as a nurse at an elder care facility. At home, the couple has their hands full raising five children: budding teens Elia and Emanuel (Jonathan Ciprian Breazu)—who spend their free time doing chores alongside their scripture-quoting father—plus two elementary-aged kids and a newborn. Mungiu frames these opening scenes as a neighborly embrace against the idyll of a peaceful waterside village.
To their father’s unease, the teens immediately bond with the neighboring daughter of their headmaster (Markus Scarth Tønseth), the rebellious Noora (Henrikke Lund Olsen), whose mother, Mia (Lisa Carlehed, strongly resembling Juliette Binoche) befriends Lisbet, providing a watchful eye on Mia’s aged father (Øyvind Venstad Kjeksrud).
But things quickly turn when the children’s conservative LGBTQ+ comments at school raise eyebrows, bolstered by unexplained bruises on Elia’s neck. While Mungui sidesteps their origin, the school’s vigilant child protective services liaison (Lisa Love Kongsli) immediately summons an agency case worker (the imperiously steely Ellen Dorrit Petersen). After an off-the-cuff remark from Emanuel about family punishment, an abuse conclusion is immediate, minus investigation.
The draconian first protocol is the immediate placement of the children in foster care, and in a shattering extended scene, Lisbet first welcomes the dispassionate agency into the family home before being strong-armed into giving up her children. The astonishing Renisve, Oscar-nominated for last year’s Sentimental Value, leaves no primal emotion on the table. Meanwhile, conflicted Mihai is forced to sign an official confession of using physical discipline—slapping—in the home.
While Lisbet turns to non-practicing former attorney Mia to represent the couple in their legal battle, Mihai stirs up high-profile internet support, urging Christians to protest what he sees as the state’s clear religious persecution of the family’s “traditional” values—in other words, “Am I on trial for my beliefs?” he asks in an intense court grilling, on whether he believes in marriage equality or uses ancient Bible passages to validate corporal punishment. At one juncture, we meet the children’s temporary foster mother who testifies that the children have been denied smartphones, music, and the internet, as if that qualifies as abuse; parental rights are somehow twisted as something children need protection from, suggesting a broader culture war, not abuse, up to the state to decide.
Mungiu—who extensively researched the real-life Marius and Ruth Bodnariu, Romanian-Norwegian evangelical Christian parents living in Norway whose five children were removed from their custody—is careful not to stack the deck, though clearly there is a point. Just as his R.M.N. was a pushback, or indictment, of clannish, small-town xenophobia toward immigrants and the hand of the E.U., so too is Fjord an unmistakable statement about how a self-congratulatory, Western, progressive utopia is just as narrow-minded in its blind spot savagery, and just as tribal, as R.M.N.’s Transylvanian small-towners eschewing inclusion.
With a careful camera that prizes master shots of rooms—court, offices, meetings with both sides—the filmmaker keenly avoids close-ups that would curry sympathy, even if we can’t help but be guided by the brilliant Stan and Reinsve, who always hold our basic sympathies against the ice-cold fist of the Barnevernet and its zero-tolerance, nuance-free “protectiveness.” But are they really out to protect secular values, or the children? Why can’t the officials see, as we do, that they are warmly loving parents?
Mungiu gives the children, at least once spirited away from their home, no chance to clarify or articulate if they feel abused, or how they feel about their parents; they are merely swept up in a storm; at two junctures, real avalanches threaten to bury the school. Yet it is clear they are becoming their own people, defiantly sneaking out at night to race a motorboat on the fjord while Elia and Noora share a growing, more-than-friends tenderness.
Special mention goes to the warm Carlehed as Mia, truly the film’s third lead, whose port-in-a-storm support of the Gheorghius both in court and in a community that has largely turned its back is immensely welcome, and her scenes defending the family at trial are a compassionate counterpoint to the hostility.
The film ends on a magical realist note, or at least that’s how I read it, though others may see it literally. There’s an optical illusion of sorts not unlike the conclusion of Hal Ashby’s 1979 Being There, and for such a grittily realistic film it’s disarmingly poetic in suggesting a miracle.
3 1/2 stars
