{"id":1476,"date":"2020-12-16T22:02:04","date_gmt":"2020-12-16T22:02:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=1476"},"modified":"2020-12-27T02:04:16","modified_gmt":"2020-12-27T02:04:16","slug":"graduation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2020\/12\/16\/graduation\/","title":{"rendered":"Graduation"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Graduation<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Romanian director Cristian Mungiu\u2019s award-winning film examines life in a corrupt and amoral society\u2014but not without a small example of the redeeming practice of virtue.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Tim Markatos<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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The idea of a society where no one ever does the right thing conjures visions of anarchy and civilizational collapse; Cristian Mungiu, a pioneering writer and director in the Romanian New Wave filmmaking movement, is wise to the contrary. His new film Graduation<\/em>, which won Mungiu a Best Director berth at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, depicts a world in which systematic immorality is consistent with a kind of civilizational stability.<\/p>

Graduation<\/em> opens on a street scene of a cluster of apartment buildings in Cluj-Napoca, Romania\u2019s second-largest metropolitan area. It\u2019s far from a post-apocalyptic neighborhood, but everything in frame has seen better days\u2014here\u2019s a post-automobile, a post-lawn, a post-playground sitting rather sadly in the background. The very next shot takes us inside one of these apartments to a living room peacefully a world unto itself. There\u2019s a wall full of family photos, a large still life of a placid breakfast scene, some fruit on the coffee table, and heirloom furniture defiantly at odds with the IKEA aesthetic we\u2019ve grown accustomed to see furnish houses in European films. For a few blissful seconds, all is well in this corner of Romania. Then a rock comes flying through the window.<\/p>

Romeo (Adrian Titieni), the doctor who lives here, shuffles onscreen to investigate and clean up the glass. He doesn\u2019t seem all that perturbed, especially compared to his startled teenage daughter Eliza (Maria-Victoria Dragas) and wife Magda (Lia Bugnar), whose wearied voice emanates from behind a closed bedroom door; when she emerges from her room some moments later, after husband and daughter have cleared out, you get the sense from her haggard look and stiffened body language that she\u2019s seen this movie one too many times already.<\/p>

The viewer would be well advised not to mistake Graduation <\/em>for a whodunit. You never find out who threw that rock, nor does Romeo spend much time trying to track down the culprit; he\u2019s more concerned with his daughter\u2019s upcoming Baccalaureate exams. Eliza has been accepted into Cambridge on a generous scholarship, contingent upon excellent performance in her end-of-school-year tests. Romeo thrills to the prospect of sending his daughter away from their backwater city so she can have better choices in life than he and Magda ever did, but the possibility that Eliza might underperform and blow her one shot at escaping Romania keeps him on edge. While the whole household is fretting over the exams, Romeo has a slew of other problems to deal with: the affair with a younger woman he is trying to keep secret from Eliza (Magda evidently knows), his aging mother\u2019s frailty and susceptibility to heart attacks, and his obligation to perform an under-the-counter liver transplant for a man Romeo had bribed years ago to avoid the military draft.<\/p>

As if this weren\u2019t enough of a morass of stressful circumstances to get any parent\u2019s heart racing, on the morning of her first exam Eliza is beaten up outside the school. Mungiu does not show us what exactly happens, leaving the question of sexual assault on the table, but he does make clear that whoever attacked Eliza has definitely broken her writing arm. A bit of a song-and-dance routine with the police ensues (this wouldn\u2019t be a Romanian New Wave film without an absurdist sketch of the inefficiencies of bureaucracy), and finally Romeo confronts his daughter with a plan to make sure she can finish her exams and cash in on the Cambridge scholarship: cheat.<\/p>

Eliza doesn\u2019t want any part of this rule-breaking, but in the warped logic of this universe Romeo\u2019s exhortation to vice is practically a virtue. For in the slice of Romanian society depicted in Graduation<\/em> the adults have effectively grown so used to corruption and responding to their circumstances immorally that they have all forgotten what it looks like to do good in the first place. Critic Victor Morton has astutely called the film\u2019s world a \u201cStructure of Sin,\u201d an apt description for the web of rationalized bad behavior that Mungiu spins tight across each one of the movie\u2019s 128 minutes. According to Morton, \u201cGraduation<\/em> is not the story of a good man corrupted but a corrupt man trying to do \u2018good\u2019 (when it serves him and his) because society runs on corruption.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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He frames almost every critical conversation in the film with both interlocutors occupying opposite sides of the shot, camera placed firmly between them, to prevent the viewer from making any moral judgments about the characters on aesthetic grounds.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Indeed, while Mungiu\u2019s shaky cam and tight editing keep our anxieties high, society here appears to be getting along just fine\u2014with the caveat that the only way anyone in it knows how to respond to sin is through the logic of sin. The way Mungiu blocks out his scenes further complicates our tendency to try to discern moral superiority in the way that actors are filmed. He frames almost every critical conversation in the film with both interlocutors occupying opposite sides of the shot, camera placed firmly between them, to prevent the viewer from making any moral judgments about the characters on aesthetic grounds.<\/p>

Eliza, thanks to the malleability of her youth, is the closest we have to a morally neutral agent in the film. Thus, the central dramatic question of Graduation<\/em> is not whether Romeo will ever identify who threw a rock through his window, but rather whether Eliza will follow her father\u2019s advice and break the rules on her exams. Mungiu doesn\u2019t give us a clear answer right away. As circumstances contrive to ratchet up Romeo\u2019s anxiety\u2014his mother suffers a heart attack, he grows suspicious that Eliza\u2019s boyfriend might actually be the unseen assailant\u2014he vents his frustration at Eliza\u2019s indecisiveness in a heated confrontation where he calls her hesitation to cheat an act of disrespect for her parents\u2019 wishes and their lifelong struggle to give her a better life.<\/p>

Ay, there\u2019s the rub: no matter how he may have initially framed it to his daughter, at heart Romeo believes his directive to cheat is a moral obligation, not a suggestion. How else could he redeem all of his and Magda\u2019s pointless toil in a third-rate city and the absence of opportunity there than by obliging his daughter to act in accordance to principles that will, to the outside world at least, render Romeo\u2019s parenting a success story?<\/p>

Accentuating this moral bankruptcy is the place religion occupies (or doesn\u2019t occupy) in Mungiu\u2019s film. According to the Pew Research Center\u2019s recent survey of the religious landscape of Central and Eastern Europe, Romania is a country where 86 percent of inhabitants identify as Orthodox Christians. Yet if Orthodoxy with its theology, liturgy, and community might have offered Mungiu\u2019s characters an alternative to a culture of corruption and immorality, it long ago ceased to be in the picture in any potent way. The only appearance that Orthodoxy makes in the film is through icons, and lots of them\u2014in Magda\u2019s room most prominently, but also in the police station, on wall calendars, in the hospital\u2014artifacts serving as windows into the Kingdom of God, where life is otherwise, and looking out on a people for whom it is never too late to course-correct.<\/p>

Mungiu has been intensely critical of the Orthodox Church in his filmography, though never without due reason, so there\u2019s little to suggest from his work that he sees Christianity as either a means out of Romania\u2019s current cultural and political predicament or an end worth pursuing in itself. Still, he does have room for hope\u2014as do his contemporaries. Corneliu Porumboiu\u2019s 2015 film The Treasure<\/em> ends on an uplifting note of selfless giving, and Cristi Puiu\u2019s 2016 Sieranevada<\/em> miraculously finds a way to depict the coexistence, however combative, of the religiously apathetic, the old guard of anti-Church Communists, a younger generation of pro-Church Monarchists, and a humble new flock of seminary graduates around one microcosmic dinner table.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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A society doesn\u2019t necessarily require a coherent or even true conception of virtue to function with a semblance of stability.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Mungiu makes his own attempt at turning away from pessimism, which marked the endings of his previous films, toward hopefulness in the final shot of Graduation<\/em>. The clouds part and the film\u2019s standard palette of blues, greens, and grays finally admits a diffuse orange light into the frame, just as Eliza reveals to her father that she made peace with finishing her exams without cheating after all. Whether she ended up scoring high enough to retain her scholarship is a question left unanswered, though judging by Eliza\u2019s smile in the sun\u2019s luminescent glow, she just might have found an alternative to the meritocratic anti-morality that has ensnared her parents and their society for so long.<\/p>

A corrupt society won\u2019t be changed all of a sudden by the actions of a single teenager, but Eliza\u2019s example to her father is not something to be brushed aside easily. Like the virtuous father in Porumboiu\u2019s The Treasure <\/em>who uses his share in the eponymous riches to buy and distribute jewelry to children on the playground, Eliza has taken a step toward reclaiming a better understanding of duty and morality. A society doesn\u2019t necessarily require a coherent or even true conception of virtue to function with a semblance of stability, as Alasdair MacIntyre has so persuasively shown in After Virtue<\/em>. All the more reason, then, to hold fast to those stories that help us to see beyond the messiness of our current sociopolitical predicaments and to learn not just what morality really looks like, but how it is practiced for the benefit of our flourishing.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Tim Markatos<\/strong> is a film critic and graphic designer who lives in Washington D.C. He is a graduate of Georgetown University, where he studied classical languages and French.<\/em>
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Romanian director Cristian Mungiu\u2019s award-winning film examines life in a corrupt and amoral society\u2014but not without a small example of the redeeming practice of 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