Graduation (Bacalaureat)
(Romania/Belgium/France, 128 min.)
Written and directed by Cristian Mungiu
Starring: Adrian Titieni, Maria-Victoria Dragus, Lia Bugnar, Vlad Ivanov, Malina Manovici, Petre Ciubotaru
Cristian Mungiu is back from detention. The Romanian auteur who
won Cannes’ Palme d’Or winner and drew notice to the Romanian new wave with 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days returns
with a film that mostly delivers on the promise of his 2007 breakthrough. The long
takes are back in tried and tested form following a tediously slow slump with
his much-lauded-but-excruciatingly-tedious Beyondthe Hills. This taut psychological drama displays carefully rehearsed
restraint as Mungiu creates a complex moral fable out of one family’s despair.
Romeo makes one bad decision after another as he becomes the
corrupt pen pusher that his country toiled to escape after the socialist era.
Bumping up a city official on the organ donor list, say, to snag Eliza a few
extra minutes of exam time is just one of the efforts that the good doctor
takes in his misguided attempt to be a better man. It doesn’t end well for
Romeo—nor should one expect it to in a film like this one—and Mungiu lets the
good doctor’s world collapse as the corruption disintegrates every support
beneath him. Hypocrisy and corruption go hand in hand for Romeo and his success
in getting Eliza through her exams relies on his ability to peddle his good
reputation and name—never mind the fact that he’s having an affair when we
first meet him.
The breakdown of his marriage and the family’s ensuing
divide provide Graduation’s greater
scenes as they intimately connect the social and psychological realism of
Mungiu’s no frills, kitchen sink style. The director favours long takes and
medium shots that could easily double as master shots for directors looking to establish
a scene, but the overdrawn moments of Graduation
sting with the restlessness and asphyxiation of a marriage, which, like the
shot, has gone on for far too long. Romeo’s failure to bridge the divides in
his family mirrors the disrepair of his larger community: corrupt practices are
as effective as Band Aids from Dollarama are when it comes to healing.
Graduation is, in
many ways, the film that Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman strives to be in that they both put men on similar quests to
restore honour to the women in their families following violent assaults by
predatory men. The film benefits from keeping the scope of the drama zeroed in
on the intersections between familial and social breakdowns, whereas Farhadi’s
film somewhat muddles its staid morality play with a take on Arthur Miller that
never comes to fruition. At the same time, Graduation
also suffers from two drawbacks that mar The Salesman. One is an uncomfortable air of misogyny as the
resolute patriarchs treat assaults on female family members as personal
affronts. The other hiccup is that both directors lapse into routine. The style
is there, but it’s something we’ve seen before.
Graduation
delivers on the promise of 4 Months, 3
Weeks, and 2 Days in the sense that Mungiu has established a comfort zone
that isn’t dissatisfying. (Praise Beyond
the Hills all you want, but it’s inexplicably pointless.) Mungiu certainly
owns the long take thing, the bare bones compositions, and the drab miserablism
that looks hungry for a little light. Graduation
carries the Best Director prize from last year’s Cannes Film Festival (he
tied Oliver Assayas for Personal Shopper)
but Mungiu’s compatriot Cristi Puiu should have taken it instead for Sieranevada, which does everything this
film does and then some in a darkly funny satire. It’s not to say that Graduation isn’t worth a ticket, since
delivers a film that is technically accomplished, socially relevant, and
exactly what one expects it to be walking in the door, but one can’t help but
leave the film fulfilled, if wanting a little more from the morality play.
No matter how much Romeo blunders, though, Mungiu and
Titieni create a consistently compelling character. The father’s effort to safeguard
his daughter’s future is understandable as he recalibrates his moral compass to
lead him down the path he feels is right. The corruption becomes palpably
swampy, yet there isn’t a moment in which one fails to hear Graduation ask what one might have done
in his position. It’s a hard question to answer as Graduation teaches us just how easily anyone can be corrupted.
Graduation opens Friday, June 2 at TIFF Bell Lightbox.
