GRADUATION (Bacalaureat)
B+
Romania France
Belgium (128 mi) 2015
‘Scope d: Cristian Mungiu Official
site
Winner of the
Best Director prize at Cannes, the film is brilliantly written and directed by
Cristian Mungiu, among the best directors working today, still best known for
his Palme d’Or winning film 4
Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (4 luni, 3 saptamâni si 2 zile) (2007), one of
the most legendary and influential films of the last 20 years, with no musical
soundtrack, but presented through a grim, social realist style that is
expressed with a throbbing, dramatic urgency, while being one of the first
Eastern European films to challenge the entrenched patriarchal
hierarchy. Once more, Mungiu has provided another bleak look at the
profound depths of entrenched corruption in the post-Ceaușescu era of Romanian
society, despite this being the generation of hope. In this case, Romeo (Adrian Titieni), a bedraggled
middle-aged guy who already looks like he’s been beaten down by the system, not
at all like a Romeo, is a respected doctor in a small rural community where
crime is rampant, sheltering his 18-year old teenage daughter Eliza,
Maria-Victoria Dragus, the young blond girl in Haneke’s THE WHITE RIBBON
(2009), through the storm, providing an educational pathway out of the cesspool
that is the town of Cluj, as she has the grades to get into Cambridge University
in England to study psychology, but needs to pass a final exam with a score
high enough to preserve a grade point average that qualifies for a
scholarship. So the film sets up a
realistic and reachable challenge, only to be impeded by unforeseen
obstacles. One of the first moments of
the film is the sudden surprise of a rock being thrown through a window, where
Romeo runs outside to see who might have thrown it, but is at a loss, creating
an eerie and ominous opening salvo that shatters any idea of things being
normal. What distinguishes this film is
the meticulous attention to detail, showing a town in decay, with colorless concrete
tenement buildings that all look the same, stray dogs wandering the streets
that can be heard throughout the night, offering a grim view of a stagnant
society that is crumbling before our eyes.
As he drops his daughter off at school the next day about a block from
school, he’s in a hurry to meet his mistress, Sandra (Malina Manovici), one of
Eliza’s teachers, living in another one of these grim-looking concrete
structures. While there, he gets a call
that his daughter has been sexually attacked at a construction site near her
school, but that she fended off a would-be rapist, injuring her arm in the
process, which ends up in a cast, leaving her severely traumatized. Overwhelmed by grief for not taking her all
the way to the school steps, Romeo blames himself for what happened, thinking
if he wasn’t in such a hurry to hop in the sack with his girlfriend, none of
this would ever have happened.
At police
headquarters, Romeo is desperate to help his daughter, having failed to get the
exams postponed, where she begins the first of three days of final exams on the
very next day. On the advice of the
police chief (Vlad Ivanov), an old friend from school days, he suggests Romeo
seek the help of Vice-Mayor Bulai, who is friendly with the school’s
exam committee president (Gelu Colceag) and could use help getting bumped up on the liver transplant waiting
list. “People should help each other,”
the Vice-Mayor explains. It’s the
proverbial a friend of a friend syndrome, a world of favors and male privilege,
extending the old boys network practices of the past with a connecting link of
male friends that know another male friend, which is how things really get
done. Romeo’s mind is racing at the
thought he might be able to cut corners to guarantee the test results his daughter
needs, a dreadful thought, really, resorting to cheating, so disrespectful of
his daughter, but something in the long run that he thinks will seem
insignificant. While his own marriage
seems to be surviving on fumes, as he and his listless wife Magda (Lia Bugnar)
barely speak, it’s clear they left under Ceaușescu communism but returned post
1989 with high hopes and dreams, thinking they could “move mountains,” but nothing’s
changed and he has regretted the decision ever since, surrounded by incompetence,
corruption and moral failings. While
he’s apparently never resorted to these kinds of methods before, his daughter
performs poorly after the first day of tests, where he feels he must intercede
on her behalf if she is to fulfill his dream of getting her out of Romania, but
it must be with her implicit participation.
Meanwhile, someone has thrown another rock through his car window,
adding an element of paranoia to an unsettled mood of disturbance. The film is seen almost exclusively through
the eyes of Romeo, whose dogged persistence through an abyss of disillusionment
is a tribute to Titieni’s brilliance, as his feelings and failed ambitions are
channeled directly to the audience, which might explain why he always has to
have the last word on any matter, thinking he’s the smartest guy in the room, making
sure his way prevails, as he’s worked it out in his mind that this is for the
best. His daughter is not so sure, and hesitates
to do what her father asks, as it goes against everything he’s ever taught
her. Making matters more complicated,
Eliza has been spending time with Marius (Rares Andrici), a low-life guy on a
motorcycle with little future, who never took studies seriously, and may hold
her back. While reviewing surveillance
footage of his daughter’s attack, Romeo thinks he recognizes Marius at the
scene and confronts him, suspicious of his alleged non-involvement, but Marius
claims it’s a case of mistaken identity, leaving what actually happened in a
cloud of ambiguity.
This feeling of “nothing is as it seems” pervades
throughout, like the opening rock through the window, suggesting an alternate
reality, an unseen presence lurking nearby, like an underground shadow
existence that is felt, but never seen.
Romeo insists on investigating clues himself, but feels like he’s being
watched, as if someone is following him, leading to eerie scenes that veer into
the thriller genre, as if there is an element of dread and unanticipated horror
about to manifest itself, his guilty conscience hounded by the sounds of dogs
barking, which is accentuated by the filmmaker’s intricately controlled
aesthetic, with hand-held, over-the-shoulder camera shots, along with a
tendency toward long takes that reflect the puzzled interior suspicions of the
protagonist, who is not exactly the pillar of the community, as he’s a man that
continually harbors dark resentments, which is why he has an overcontrolling
personality, as he insists that things go exactly as he plans. But his system breaks down, with even Romeo
realizing the futility of his methods, as Eliza distances herself from her
father and gravitates more to Marius as her boyfriend, who at least is her same
age, while at the same time Magda finds out about the secret affair and throws
the bastard out, along with his personal belongings, maintaining a shred of
what’s left of her dignity, leaving Romeo in an emotional and psychological
freefall, as he’s literally out on his own.
Meanwhile, a few special investigators come snooping around the hospital
asking questions about stolen organs and tampering with the organ donor waiting
list, keeping the pressure on his frazzled state of mind, as he has to keep one
step ahead of the rest, but it’s clear he’s near the breaking point. With
the music of Handel playing on the car radio, Andreas Scholl Largo di
Handel Ombra mai fu Aria da Xerxes HWV 40 ... YouTube (3:11), this gorgeous
mastery of controlled restraint resonates deeply as a stark contrast to Romeo’s
interior world that’s falling apart. It’s
an extraordinary character study, a complex film of psychological subtlety and
moral weight, and a powerful social
commentary on how the moral compromises seen in the world around us have a way
of infiltrating our defense mechanisms and making their way into our own
behavior as well, where we’re so consumed by taking preventative measures that
we become what we’re fighting against.
Perhaps without realizing it, the sins of one generation are handed down
onto the next. Like the Coen brothers
pulling the strings and pestering the protagonist in A
Serious Man (2009), Mungiu loves adding new surprises that further
complicate Romeo’s growing dilemma, chief among them is that Eliza may not be
that interested in going to the UK, an idea that her father insists is mere
foolishness, while Sandra was not too keen on introducing her young son to
Romeo, initially seen wearing a mask, exactly like the Shakespearean character
at the masked ball, though after the initial suspicion wears off, they seem to
develop an unspoken truce with one another.
In the end, this unvarnished film examines a nation’s damaged conscience
through a drama of raw, accumulated day-to-day detail, where each scene has its
own impact, revealing the small ways that we undermine the society we live in,
continually lying to ourselves and rationalizing the benefits of our personal
decisions, presumably made with the best intentions (“Do good reasons make up
for bad decisions?”), yet this all contributes to a toxic air of societal mistrust.
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