Fjord: Cristian Mungiu’s Icy and Ambiguous Culture-Wars Drama

Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan play an embattled Christian couple in the Romanian director’s Palme D’Or contender, his first to shoot in Norway

A devout Christian couple have their kids taken away for alleged physical abuse in director Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, which takes the powder-keg tension of his last film, RMN, and moves it two thousand miles north to the remote mountain town of Ålesund, Norway.

Working with a largely international cast for the first time in his career, Mungiu’s film stars Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan as Lisbet and Mihai Gheorgiu, who recently returned to Lisbet’s native Ålesund from Mihai’s home country of Romania with their five kids. It’s a beautiful place, but the welcome soon turns as frosty as the weather when a teacher finds bruises on their daughter Elia’s shoulder during gym class, and the school’s child protection officer, Gunda, is called in.

When Elia (Vanessa Ceban) and her brother, Timotei (Filip Sebastian Berau), are confronted with a bunch of leading questions from Gunda (played with mirthless aplomb by Ellen Dorrit Petersen, who has form tormenting Reinsve in Armand) and a teacher at the school, they dutifully cop to receiving the occasional “slap on the butt” from their parents. The police are called and criminal charges are brought against Mihai, while Lisbet is ambushed at home by Gunda who informs her – with no little relish, it seems – that the kids will be placed into protective custody while the allegations are investigated. As a concession, she is allowed to express milk to be sent to her baby.

Mungiu maintains an initially cool distance from the Gheorgius, as if to ask a question of his audience, but they are basically a decent bunch: Mihai with his downbeat, slightly Ned Flanders-ish airs, Lisbet his more naturally effusive foil. They engage a lawyer who leaves them in the lurch after deciding she doesn’t care much for the stricken Mihai’s “tone” – one of many moments in the film where we’re left to wonder what the family is really on trial for here. Incensed, Mihai seeks help from a group of Romanian evangelicals who orchestrate a viral campaign designed to put pressure on the authorities, a tactic seemingly born of desperation more than any particular animus towards the secular liberalism these shady characters so transparently loathe. Lisbet, meanwhile, seeks help from the only neighbour prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt, a defence lawyer called Mia (Lisa Carlehed) whose wayward daughter, Noora (Henrike Lund Olsen), strikes up a close bond with Elia and Timotei.

A court battle ensues with a prosecution lawyer who has no qualms about using the Gheorgius’ faith – and Mihai’s nationality – as ammunition for his case, but with a criminal trial still looming the family’s problems show no signs of going away. By portraying his characters as caught between secular intolerance and Christian nationalist shit-stirring, Mungiu conjures a nifty metaphor for a world where bad-faith narratives prevail over truths that may force us to look a little harder at our own presumptions.

Lost in this contemptible mix are the children. Virtually everyone in the film claims to be acting in their best interest but succeeds only in making them miserable – Elia and Timotei, most obviously, but also Noora, in whom Mungiu hides away much of the film’s humanity. A troubled teen who talks openly of suicide – she makes a half-hearted attempt at slashing her wrists when taking her new friends for a joyride on her family’s boat – Noora is described with some rich irony by her mum as having “a bit of an empathy problem”, but turns out to be the Gheorgius’ staunchest ally, along with her mute grandfather, Frederick (Erik Hivju), who has some secrets of his own.

As for the cast, there is perhaps something jarring in Mungiu’s attempt to tamp down his two leads’ natural magnetism through male pattern balding and frumpy dresses. Opportunities for flashy emoting are in short supply, and the film perhaps lacks any moments of heart-stopping drama to match his bravura, single-take town hall showdown from RMN. Stan brings wounded dignity to his role as a kind of beaten-down Ned Flanders; Reinsve brings her natural warmth to Lisbet as the more open-hearted of the two. In the end though, Fjord’s most intriguing touch is a moment of magic delivered so casually you’ll question what you’ve even seen – which of course is precisely the point in a film so absorbed in problems of perspective. Is it a miracle? Not quite, but Mungiu’s drama of neighbourly unfeeling speaks urgently to the questions of our time.