Fjord review: Cristian Mungiu at sea with strange child abuse drama starring Renate Reinsve and Seba

R omanian director and Palme laureate Cristian Mungiu – the winner here in 2007 with his stunning 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days – comes to Cannes with an anticlimactic, underpowered movie which it seems to me could be part of an odd phenomenon at this year’s festival, detectable also in films here by Kantemir Balagov and Ryusuke Hamaguchi: auteurs making coproduction movies outside their home turf and mother tongue with big foreign stars, perhaps as a result of creative conversations at internati

Ultimately, the film does not compellingly deliver a blazing truth about its various relationships – but neither does it intriguingly withhold any such truth from us. Sebastian Stan plays a Romanian guy called Mihai, married to a Norwegian woman called Lisbet (Renate Reinsve); they have to come to live in the beautiful, remote village of Lisbet’s birth because Mihai, a qualified software engineer, can get an IT job and there is a strong church community thereabouts which is a great attraction as Mihai and Lisbet are fundamentalist conservative Christians who are very strict. They are given a warm welcome by their (non-Christian) neighbours, who are the school’s headteacher and his wife. The film begins on a disquieting, ambiguous moment: Mihai has clearly just delivered a punishment of some sort to their teenage daughter who is now required to give him a penitent hug. The school’s staff notice that the children have marks and bruises. They are gently but pointedly questioned and (perhaps) incriminate their parents because they are not sufficiently proficient in any language other than Romanian. Perhaps the language issue also contributes to the calamitous statement Mihai then gives to the police with no lawyer present. With lightning speed, the children are taken into provisional care pending a hearing and criminal trial. Things are complicated by a growing concern about their neighbours’ elderly disabled father and about Mihai and Lisbet’s daughter forming a close relationship with their neighbours’ rebellious teen daughter. There is something undoubtedly ingenious in the way Mungiu invites the audience to sympathise with the children, and side against this ice-cold patriarch – and then almost side with the patriarch against the blandly smug, supercilious officers of a system weighted against them. Liberal prejudice against them as Christians or as Romanians arguably plays its part. But the facts of the matter do not seem to be in doubt: Mihai concedes he smacks or slaps the children occasionally – quite normal in the robust world of Romania.

Key points

• Ultimately, the film does not compellingly deliver a blazing truth about its various relationships – but neither does it intriguingly withhold any such truth from us.
• Sebastian Stan plays a Romanian guy called Mihai, married to a Norwegian woman called Lisbet (Renate Reinsve); they have to come to live in the beautiful, remote village of Lisbet’s birth because M…
• They are given a warm welcome by their (non-Christian) neighbours, who are the school’s headteacher and his wife.
• The film begins on a disquieting, ambiguous moment: Mihai has clearly just delivered a punishment of some sort to their teenage daughter who is now required to give him a penitent hug.
• The school’s staff notice that the children have marks and bruises.