How do we balance individual choice and collective good? To what extent do we let an individual’s freedom of expression and religious belief encroach on the safety and well-being of others? When those whose well-being may be harmed are children, does that change our analysis?
These are difficult questions, whether in our own context in the United States, in a social democratic country like Norway, or in the socialist future we are working towards. Fjord, the latest film from Christian Mungiu and winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is beautifully shot and directed, with subtle and engaging performances from its two leads. Unfortunately, rather than giving full voice to conflicting answers to tough questions and letting the film, and its audience, wrestle with them, Mungiu tips the scales. While the director has said that he intended to be “nonjudgmental” and that he is “trying to position [him]self in the middle,” the film’s treatment of its thorny subject lacks the adroitness and nuance necessary to pull off its stated purpose.
In Fjord, Mihai Gheorghiu (Sebastian Stan), a Romanian man, his Norwegian wife Lisbet (Renate Reinsve), and their five children, including eldest daughter Elia (Vanessa Ceban), move from Romania to Lisbet’s small hometown in rural Norway. The Gheorghius awkwardly start to mesh with the townsfolk, including two neighbors: Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olse), Elia’s school friend, and Mia (Lisa Carlehed), a lawyer who stopped practicing to take care of her father-in-law. When teachers come to believe that the children may have suffered physical abuse, Child Protection steps in, temporarily taking the children. Mihai and Lisbet, devout Christians, speculate that they are the subject of religious persecution and search for a way to get their children back.
There’s a nuanced version of a film on this sensitive subject that’s powerful and compelling. Occasionally, Fjord is that nuanced version. Mostly it isn’t. The cinematography is beautiful, and Reinsve’s and Stan’s performances bring specificity and humanity to characters who, by most accounts, are politically and culturally quite different from both the actors and the movie’s intended audience. Both characters clearly love their children and believe themselves to be doing the right thing. At the same time, Stan is holding back an anger we almost never see manifest, and Reinsve reveals to the viewer doubts she never shares with her husband or family. There is much the movie does not tell us that comes through in their acting. If you’re looking for it, you can find a tension in their relationship, particularly in a scene where they are preparing for and driving to court.
Cardboard Characters
Unfortunately, the movie gives no such attention and grace to the couple’s opponents. The teachers and social workers who are made mouthpieces for pluralism and progressive values are smarmy and officious. The viewer is emotionally manipulated to take the Gheorghius’ side. Gunda, the primary social worker on the case, is the most egregious example; she is only curt and cold towards the Gheorghius, but we never see any motivation for why she behaves this way, or what caused her to commit her life to work that evokes the hatred of so many parents. She is not a character but a cardboard stand-in for an idea the filmmaker wishes to pillory.
We briefly get the flip side of these figures: officials from the Romanian embassy are boorish and offputting in their political and cultural conservatism, but the movie suggests that their problem is more one of style than of substance. The only adult character other than the parents who is shown with any kind of nuance is Mia, who is never more than uneasy about the Gheorghius’ parenting.
Good filmmaking can put conflicting ideas in tension, giving you multiple perspectives that are compelling, sometimes uncomfortable and seemingly intractable, and can compel the viewer to sit with that unease. Provoking thought and struggling through complex, unsettling ideas is one of the great virtues of art. In Fjord, Mungiu is not handing you a thorny issue and asking you to deal with it; he’s pedantically presenting a forceful critique of one perspective he thinks is wrong. In the script, the casting, the direction, the cinematography, everything, the director is stacking the deck to lead you to his chosen conclusion.
For much of the movie’s action, and for at least the first 90 minutes of its runtime, Fjord feels frustratingly didactic in virtually every element. My first eyeroll came when, moments after Lisbet is told that Child Protection will be taking her children, the Norwegian flag outside her window flutters into frame with all the subtlety of a hammer. We hear multiple times that one of the parenting failings of the Gheorghius is that they don’t let their children watch Youtube.
That kind of thudding sanctimony from a filmmaker is usually boring, whatever the point. When the message is that Christians are being persecuted, in a country where Evangelical Lutheranism remains the official religion and churches are subsidized by the state, it becomes too preposterous to stomach. A movie that demonstrates such subtlety in its performances, communicating so much while stating so little, is shockingly heavy-handed in its political messageing.
The movie’s saving grace, aside from Stan’s and Reinsve’s performances, is the children. The scenes of Noora, Elia, and her brother Emanuel show teenagers figuring out their way in the world against the stark backdrop of the fjord. The possibly-more-than-platonic relationship between Noora and Elia, never made explicit, is presented lovingly, and while the viewer may dread that love running headlong into Elia’s family, who seem aware of it but never do more than watch the girls closely and with apparent care, it is kept only in the back of your mind.
Except for one line near the end, Mihai and Lisbet never discourage Elia’s relationship, while still communicating their apprehension, and Noora’s commitment to Elia throughout is a powerful throughline even when the film becomes frustrating. Unfortunately, the film’s final moments pull you out of their relationship and back into its failed central premise.