Compelling ‘Graduation’ makes grade with top acting
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, so they say, as are the roads in Romania in “Graduation,” Cristian Mungiu’s excellent film.
Make that paved with good intentions and bad maintenance. The entire country seems to be either falling down or being rebuilt, a fretful state of confusion and disrepair that seemingly extends to every aspect of life. The film begins with a man digging a hole on the side of a road so deep we can’t even see him anymore, just the rocks and dirt he flings with his shovel.
Then we see a rock crash through the window of the apartment where Romeo Aldea (Adrian Titieni), a doctor, lives with his wife, Magda (Lia Bugnar), and daughter Eliza (Maria-Victoria Dragus). It’s notable to the family, but not remarkably so. Besides, Romeo has other things on his mind.
Mungiu (his last film was the brilliant “Beyond the Hills”) has made a film about an ordinary, if somewhat dysfunctional, family living in an extraordinary time — that is, Romania after the fall of Communism. Romeo and Magda fled the country when they were young, but returned in 1991, eager for a new start in their homeland.
This was a mistake. Their lives have stalled in a troubled country that can’t gain traction. Romeo is bitter, smug and carries on an affair with Sandra (Malina Manovici), a teacher at Eliza’s school. Magda retreats to her bedroom.
In Eliza, Romeo and Magda see the future they didn’t have. She’s qualified for a scholarship to go to school in England; all she has to do is make good-enough scores on her exams. But after Romeo drops her off for the tests she is attacked. She fends off a would-be rapist but injures her writing arm, putting the remaining tests — and, perhaps, her scholarship — in jeopardy.
OK, most people wouldn’t put the scholarship above their child’s well-being. Romeo is not most people. He decides that she will take the exams. This is the beginning of an increasingly desperate attempt to ensure that she gets the scholarship.
How? In the only way that anyone with a trace of power in Romania seems to understand: favors. Romeo considers himself above all this, of course — until he needs the system to work for him. His friend, a police inspector (Vlad Ivanov), assures Romeo that an old acquaintance, now a city official (Petre Ciubotaru), could put him in touch with someone who could offer some leniency in the taking and scoring of the exams.
But the official needs a new liver. Could Romeo see fit to move him up the donor list? And so it goes, one favor after another, a string of illicit deals that Romeo tries to justify by telling himself that he’s doing it all for the good of his daughter.
And isn’t he? There’s no question, despite Romeo’s perhaps questionable methods (it’s interesting to see him learn what he’s capable of), that he has his daughter’s best interest at heart.
But he’s also out for himself, as is everyone else in town. Through one man Mungiu paints a picture of a broken country, incapable of forward movement without backroom deals that leave everyone tarnished.
The acting is outstanding; Mungiu’s straightforward dialogue and naturalistic shooting make for a movie that feels genuine, with no false steps. Nothing takes us outside Romeo’s life, and by extension the life of a nation whose promise is mired in the quicksand of decay and corruption.