Romanian director and Palme laureate Cristian Mungiu, who won the prestigious award in 2007 with his stunning film "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," returns to Cannes with an anticlimactic and underpowered movie. "Fjord" appears to be part of a curious trend at this year's festival, also seen in works by Kantemir Balagov and Ryusuke Hamaguchi: auteurs creating co-productions outside their home countries and native languages, featuring big foreign stars. This shift may stem from creative exchanges at international film festivals, but it often results in a loss of focus.
"Fjord" is an odd film that bears Mungiu's signature style, with enigmatic long shots, an avoidance of close-ups, and a distinctive dinner-scene tableau where faces crowd together. However, the pain and trauma at the heart of the story are conveyed without the rewarding complexity we associate with Mungiu. The film lacks revelation or mystery, failing to deliver a blazing truth about its relationships while also not intriguingly withholding any truth.
The plot follows Mihai (Sebastian Stan), a Romanian software engineer married to Lisbet (Renate Reinsve), a Norwegian woman. They move to Lisbet's remote birth village because Mihai lands an IT job, and the strong church community appeals to them as fundamentalist conservative Christians. Their non-Christian neighbors, the school's headteacher and his wife, give them a warm welcome. The film opens with a disquieting moment: Mihai has just punished their teenage daughter, and she must give him a penitent hug. School staff notice marks and bruises on the children, leading to gentle but pointed questioning. The children, not fluent in any language other than Romanian, may incriminate their parents. Language issues also contribute to Mihai's calamitous police statement made without a lawyer. The children are swiftly taken into provisional care pending a hearing and criminal trial. Complications arise from concerns about the neighbors' elderly disabled father and the growing bond between Mihai and Lisbet's daughter and the neighbors' rebellious teen daughter.
Mungiu cleverly invites sympathy for the children against the ice-cold patriarch, then almost shifts sympathy toward the patriarch against the smug, supercilious officers of a biased system. Liberal prejudice against the family as Christians or Romanians plays a role. Yet the facts remain unclear: Mihai admits to occasionally smacking or slapping the children, which he considers normal in Romania. But do the bruises indicate something worse? The matter remains unresolved in court and the film, leading to a strangely inert and suspense-free finale at a ferry terminal. This finale reveals that the relationship between the teen girls Elia (Vanessa Ceban) and Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olsen) is another element the film has not sufficiently explored.
While Mungiu's technique remains interesting, "Fjord" is a disappointment. The film screened at the Cannes film festival.
