Saying so much with so little
“Graduation” is the latest film by Cristian Mungiu (“4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”), a Romanian director of originality and genuine power, though how he achieves his effects is difficult to pinpoint.
He makes the kind of movies that thousands of others try to make — personal films that take their time and deal with the concerns of average people. Mungiu will show you a scene of a guy eating dinner by himself, but when Mungiu does it, there’s no impulse to doze off or leap for the remote control. When other filmmakers try the same thing, their films don’t even get released.
So what is it that Mungiu is doing that other filmmakers aren’t? The first true answer has to be “Who knows?” because ultimately there’s an alchemy here that eludes analysis. But an approximate stab at the truth might go something like this: With Mungiu, you never are just watching a guy eating dinner by himself. Rather, you are watching someone who is going through something, and he just happens to be eating dinner.
But it’s more than that. With Mungiu, a scene that’s seemingly static is in fact active, because not only do we know that the guy having dinner is going through something, but we can see, just in the way that he’s eating dinner, how he’s feeling and how he’s seeing his life. So Mungiu is always giving us information, and not random information, but information that adds to the atmosphere of the story and to the story itself.
As for how Mungiu accomplishes this, maybe he’s just a lucky person whose consciousness somehow imprints itself on every scene he shoots. Or maybe he works and works until he gets everything to the point where it looks as if he’s doing nothing, while he’s doing everything.
Considering that he makes a new movie every four years, not every four months, the second interpretation is probably closer to the truth. But there is a certain amount of luck going on with Mungiu, too, because his characters command our attention even before we know anything about them. That’s the mysterious part of this, what you might call the mystery of talent.
In “Graduation,” Mungiu takes a scalpel and dissects life in modern Romania. He shows what’s wrong with the government and the impact this has on people’s relationships. He shows how some people become cynical and others despairing and others frightened. And he shows people’s mechanisms for emotional survival, including sex, corruption and psychotherapy.
OK, so that’s what he shows us. But the actual story through which he shows us this is small, just something about a few days in the life of a doctor (Adrian Titieni) who desperately wants his daughter (Maria-Victoria Dragus) to qualify for a scholarship to go to school in London. In fact, she already has the scholarship, but it’s contingent upon her getting high grades in her final exams.
She seems poised to do just that — she’s an excellent student — but on the day before the first test, some maniac jumps her and tries to rape her, and so she is understandably rattled for the next day’s exam. And from there, the story unfolds. As in “4 Months,” there are things people know they legally should do, and other things, illegal things, that they know they can probably get away with. Doing what you should do gives you a life you don’t want. But trying to get away with something risks everything.
As played by Titieni and directed by Mungiu, the doctor is a commanding personality whose natural dignity barely conceals an almost frantic anxiety: His daughter must escape Romania. She must start a new life in London. If he never sees her again, well, that would be too bad, but she has to get out. That in itself tells you everything you need to know about the character and reveals plenty about the state of Mungiu’s country.