Romanian director Christin Mungiu’s filmography includes droll tragicomedies, but his best works—4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Beyond the Hills—are essentially horror movies. Like those features, Mungiu’s new film, Graduation, is about the terrors of a corrupt and patriarchal culture. Unlike 4 Months and Beyond, which focus on the nightmarish experiences of women, Mungiu’s latest shifts the perspective to a man who is both a victim and an agent of that culture.
Romeo (Adrian Titeni) is a middle-age surgeon in a backwater Carpathian mountain town, shuffling through a sputtering marriage to Magda (Lia Bugnar). Nearly all of Romeo’s energies are focused on his accomplished daughter, Eliza (Maria-Victoria Dragus), who is about to take the final exams that will unlock a scholarship to Cambridge University. On the way to her first round of testing, however, Eliza is attacked by an assailant. This understandably sends the girl into a post-traumatic tail spin in which exam scores no longer seem significant. Romeo, conversely, is more desperate than ever to get his daughter out of Romania and works to obtain some illicit leniency for Eliza during the retesting via the complex local system of quid pro quo.
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Graduation is superbly performed and shot in a naturalistic style, full of the fraught long takes and edgy, oblique conversations that characterize the pinnacle of contemporary Romanian cinema. A seemingly stark moral conundrum lies at the center of the film: Should Romeo violate his conscience to secure a better future for his daughter? Like all of Mungiu’s features, however, there are seemingly limitless layers of complexity beneath this question, touching on themes as varied as male hypocrisy, national self-loathing, and the fine distinctions between selflessness and selfishness. In short, it’s a dense, outstanding film whose Balkan setting doesn’t diminish the potency of its universal concerns.
Opens Friday, April 28 at the Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema.
