OVERVIEW
Fjord is Cristian Mungiu’s first film made outside Romania and his first in English, set in a small Norwegian coastal village where a devout Romanian father (Sebastian Stan) and his Norwegian-born wife (Renate Reinsve) are raising five children inside their evangelical faith. When the local child welfare service receives a complaint, the family’s parenting methods are placed under formal observation, and the household is pulled into the machinery of a system designed to act quickly and decisively in the name of the children.
BACKGROUND
After winning the Palme d’Or in 2007 for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Mungiu has spent two decades excavating Romanian institutions from the inside, analyzing and questioning the residue of communism, the authority of the Orthodox church, and the daily corruption present in society. This time, he points the camera at Norway, a country that built much of its global brand around progressive social policy. The Bodnariu case of 2015, a Romanian-Norwegian Pentecostal family in the village of Naustdal whose five children were removed by the Barnevernet after the school reported suspected spanking, sparked protests in more than fifty cities and pulled the Norwegian child welfare system into a decade of international scrutiny. Internal meeting minutes later showed the agency was concerned with the family’s “Bible-based upbringing” as much as with the discipline itself. Fjord also marks the first time Mungiu has worked with international stars, which is part of what drew Neon, the world’s most powerful arthouse buyer, to acquire the film a full year before its premiere and raise expectations for it.
THE REVIEW
Having the distributor known for shepherding inaccessible auteur work into Oscar contenders is, as it turns out, one of the many ironies present in Fjord. A director who has always been interested in polemical themes, and whose work is defined by the conflict it places the audience in, now uses a sanitized version of that instinct to deliver a manufactured, toothless Oscar player, in which themes that would once have sparked intelligent discussion are reduced to blunt statements.
The casting is the first place the film’s calculation shows. Sebastian Stan and Sentimental Value‘s Renate Reinsve, two of the most awards-friendly faces in current arthouse cinema, are cast as the parents. Stan goes the action-star-in-a-serious-role route of uglyfication, with his head shaved and costumes that hide his muscular frame, while Reinsve is dressed down and given glasses. Both deliver competent performances, but the visible effort of the transformation makes it harder to forget you are watching two recognizable stars working through a Mungiu film, rather than two people living through the worst weeks of their lives.
Technically, at least, Fjord fits well into Mungiu’s filmography. Tudor Vladimir Panduru shoots the Norwegian coast in a cold, silver-blue, oppressive palette that continues to haunt the film afterward in the characters’ costumes and objects. Mungiu’s signature device, the long take with a wide composition, is present and refined to a high degree of polish, building on the grammar he first showed the world in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Shots are populated with more than one body at a time, rarely cutting to a close-up, refusing to guide the viewer to a specific point of view, and presenting the film more as a pick-your-own-adventure than a guided argument. Despite not offering anything new or pushing the director’s style into new territory, the grammar still works remarkably well at letting audiences build their own perspective.
What is not as intelligent or nuanced as the surface suggests is the story beneath it and how it analyzes its themes. In his best work, Mungiu steps back and tells a story that feels as real and authentic as possible, leaving it to the viewer to draw their conclusion. Here, the camera may stand back, but the script has already decided. The film is trying to do something difficult, asking viewers who would not normally side with a fundamentalist Christian family to do exactly that. The trouble is, it leaves them no choice. The family is drawn so cleanly, the institution so coldly, that empathy becomes the only possible outcome. Forced sympathy is not the same as earned sympathy, and when an argument lands this absolutely, the film owes us a deeper interrogation of the other side. What does the case worker believe she is protecting these children from?
Consider how the family itself is drawn. The Gheorghius are questioned for not letting their children watch YouTube or listen to popular music (how dare they?), while otherwise portrayed as almost angels on earth. Meanwhile, the social workers, the school counselor, and the village neighbors return as unfeeling extensions of the system. The film does introduce a group of openly hateful Christians later on, which raises its own question about whether the loudest voices of a faith should color how we read the quietest one. There are millions of Christians, and most of them are not the ones holding the signs. Should the Gheorghius be read as part of that vocal minority or apart from it?
Yet, the main conflict settles early, in the scene where the social worker arrives to inform Lisbet of the removal order. The social worker is written as the kind of ruthless, immovable figure that films like this usually assign to religious authority. “Why can’t you talk like a normal person?” Lisbet asks. From that point on, Fjord repeats variations of that dynamic, with little doubt or second-guessing allowed. It even goes as far as having a character state, bluntly, during the trial: ‘Why can people state their sexual preferences but not their religious beliefs?’
The only characters who undergo meaningful changes are Mia (Lisa Carlehed), the neighbor who later becomes the family’s attorney, and Lisbet, whose subplot involving an older patient’s end-of-life wish runs counter to her religious beliefs. That thread is the most genuinely Mungiu-like material in the film, which makes it even more frustrating that it never connects back to the main story in a meaningful way. Meanwhile, the children form a friendship that raises a final question the film clumsily leaves unanswered, turning what should be a striking final shot into a failed attempt at ambiguity. Everyone else holds their position from the first scene to the last. The trial scenes play out as expected, with characters stating aloud what their first appearances already established. By the end, the question Mungiu told interviewers he wanted to put before the audience has already been answered by the film itself.
FINAL THOUGHTS
I grew up in a Christian home, and a Brazilian one at that, the furthest from the Norway Fjord depicts. In other words, I was spanked as a young child. I came out alright (I think?), but I see the ramifications of that. The impact of corporal discipline is a complex and rich matter, what it does to children and parents, why and when that would justify state intervention, and what a faith-based household owes a secular society. The film settles for a simpler version of that.
Fjord is self-satisfied with simply asking audiences to side with characters they would normally disagree with, when that should be the bare minimum for provocative cinema. It also fails to dig deeper into the real problems of such an upbringing, or into why the social workers feel so repelled by this family that they persecute them at every corner. Beautiful cinematography and Mungiu’s intricate framings are not enough.