Fascinating cocktail of sinister insinuation and moral dilemmas
Graduation is the new film by previous Palme d’Or-winner Cristian Mungiu – he of the famous and devastating “Romanian abortion movie”, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007). The title is a clue that this is about a certain kind of education in present-day Romania, but it’s a resolutely unsentimental one in the tricks and tactics that seem only fair to get ahead, when the system’s not fair on any level.
Aldea (hulking Adrian Titieni, who played the bereaved father in the not dissimilar Child’s Pose) is a surgeon based in the joyless outskirts of Romania’s second-largest city Cluj, who seems, as the film begins, to be the target of malicious pranks – a brick thrown through his living room window, before he takes his talented daughter Eliza ( The White Ribbon’s sullen Maria Drăguş) to school one morning.
This mystery is put on standby after Eliza is mugged and subjected to an attempted sexual assault across the road from her school, on the eve of crucial exams.
Left badly shaken and with her arm in a cast, Eliza and her horrified parents have little above-board recourse. She needs a certain average score to secure a scholarship to Cambridge, a future on which her depressive, chain-smoking mother (Lia Bugnar) and, even more so, Aldea have their hearts set. Aldea, a stoic lump of a man, has been around the block, and knows which favours would butter up the exam authorities – moving the liver transplant of a vice-mayor up to the top of the waiting list, so that Eliza, if she plays along, can be guaranteed one straight-10 grade to counteract her poor performance the day after the attack.
Everyone understands what Aldea is trying to do, with the growing exception of the bright, independentminded Eliza, who doesn’t necessarily want to embark on adulthood by cheating, however much this might seem a forgivable shortcut after her trauma. In two of the most powerful and deeply acted scenes, father and daughter face off in two-shots as Aldea essentially tries to induct his daughter into the murky realities of “real world” compromise, much as he wishes she could have enjoyed a non-rigged entrance to the better life.
Mungiu, of all the Romanian New Wave’s key filmmakers, has the most robustly recognisable aesthetic. He likes his handheld camera to adopt the forcefield of the characters, often from behind, so that we charge forwards with them into all their difficulties. Both father and daughter are hiding secrets: Eliza’s post-assault check-up reveals that she’s lost her virginity, though not to her attacker; Aldea, meanwhile, thinks he’s getting away with his affair with one of her teachers (Mălina Manovici), which we realise is cause, or product, or both, of his wife’s terminal unhappiness.
Graduation was produced by the Dardenne brothers – the ultimate mentors in over-the-shoulder cinematic realism – and is pitted against their rival film, The Unknown Girl, at Cannes this year.
While the schematic unravelling of the Dardenne film kicks it several notches below their best work, Graduation is perhaps only one notch below Mungiu’s. He’s a master of stray threads which ping back with unexpected force, and sinister insinuation tucked around the edges, offering ambiguous closure on several of the questions thrown up.
As a vision of contemporary Romania’s grass-roots corruption, what Mungiu offers is baleful and believable because it’s not closed to redemptive gestures. Back-scratching as a communal solution may not be that novel, or win Mungiu a second Palme, but the intergenerational debate underlying Graduation does throw novel wrinkles into the mix. It’s a textbook challenge he pulls off with skill, sobriety, and a high score.