Bacalaureat
Cristian Mungiu (2016)
I wrote in a note on the writer-director Cristian Mungiu’s previous film that ‘Perhaps the gloomiest aspect of Beyond the Hills is that it takes place in a Romania nearly two decades on from Ceaușescu but the place seems as glum … as before’. This is even more explicitly the case with Mungiu’s latest, Graduation. The main character is Romeo Aldea (Adrian Titieni), a middle-aged hospital doctor who lives and works in Cluj (Romania’s largest city after Bucharest). He and his wife Magda (Lia Bugnar) returned to Romania shortly after the fall of Ceaușescu. They did so, Romeo tells their teenage daughter Eliza (Marie-Victoria Dragus), believing that the country was suddenly full of new possibilities. More than twenty years on, Romeo knows better. This makes him all the more anxious for Eliza to make the most of an imminent opportunity. Romeo has always been academically ambitious for his clever daughter. Eliza now has the offer of a place at Cambridge, conditional on the award of the Romanian Baccalaureate, the national school-leaving qualification.
The day before the final exams start, Eliza is confronted by a man who tries to rape her. She struggles and screams enough to scare him off but, in doing so, injures the wrist of her writing hand. This will seriously impede her ability to complete an examination paper within the normal time allowed but the exam administrators aren’t willing to make special arrangements for her. Romeo sees the UK as a meritocracy – a country where, unlike Romania, ‘you don’t need connections’ in order to succeed. He says so to the police chief (Vlad Ivanov) whose team is investigating the attempted assault of Eliza. From this point on, Graduation is predominantly a critique of what Cristian Mungiu sees as a corrupt, pervasive culture of back-scratching. The police chief offers to put Romeo in touch with a high-ranking politician in Cluj, who could lean on the local education chief to see that Eliza gets the exam results she needs; in exchange, Romeo might perhaps arrange for the ailing politician to jump the queue for a major hospital operation. Romeo is desperate enough for his daughter to succeed and escape to compromise his professional probity. For her part, Eliza, as a result of the attack and its aftermath, is increasingly equivocal about the prospect of leaving home and the boyfriend (Rares Andrici) of whom her father disapproves.
You wouldn’t expect this disenchanted view of present-day Romania to be light-hearted but Graduation is excessively dour – monochromatic in mood and look. (The cinematography is by Tudor Panduru.) Cristian Mungiu takes a few early steps to develop an ominous atmosphere: the film starts with a stone being thrown through a window at the Aldea home; a bit later, the windscreen of Romeo’s car is smashed. But drab claustrophobia soon sets in. The deceit and suspicion that undermine trust in public institutions is mirrored in private life. Romeo’s marriage to Magda is in its death throes; he’s having an affair with a younger woman called Sandra (Malina Manovici). Eliza wouldn’t have been attacked if her father had driven her all the way to her high school: instead, he dropped her off a little way away, so that he could grab a few minutes with Sandra before he started work at the hospital. Mungiu’s characters have family and work responsibilities; they may have useful contacts or lovers; none of them seems to have any friends in the nice sense of the word. I realised this in the film’s closing scene, when Eliza has got the grades she needed, Romeo attends the graduation ceremony at her school, and she asks her father to take a photograph. She and her classmates stand smiling into the camera. I didn’t remember a word being exchanged between any of them in the preceding two hours plus of Graduation.
Eliza reveals to Romeo in this last sequence that she’s still not keen on leaving Cluj for Cambridge, as well as something her father didn’t know: she got so upset at her first exam, she says, that the administrators, after all, took pity and gave her extra time. So Romeo needn’t have got into that tangled web of favours. This twist-in-the-tail irony feels like a multiple cheat. It’s too pat. It’s implausible that Eliza, in the face of the succession of stressful and upsetting events that occur in the story, would have had the sang-froid to keep quiet about it until the last minute. And it contrasts sharply with all the things that Cristian Mungiu leaves unresolved: who threw the stones; whether Eliza goes or stays; the identity of her assailant. The identity parade is a powerful scene but it demonstrates only that the police want to pin the crime on their suspect of choice. Graduation is a strong expression of its creator’s choler about the state of his nation but it’s limited and unilluminating as a human drama.
12 March 2017
