Fjord opens October 9 in theaters. Spoilers follow!
By Elazar Abrahams
Fjord is one of the most gripping films of the year, completely locking you in to its story on a deep emotional level. It spends the rest of its runtime making you furious. It is a deeply affecting drama about a Romanian, Christian family who move to a small Norwegian town and suddenly find their children taken away by the state.
The film is not asking us to make a perfectly balanced list of the family’s flaws and the government’s good intentions. It is showing what happens when a supposedly humane system decides that people with the “wrong beliefs” are not entitled to the same empathy as everyone else.
Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve are outstanding as Mihai and Lisbet, the parents at the center of the story. They are quickly emerging as two of the most interesting and underappreciated actors working today. Stan’s one-two punch of A Different Man and The Apprentice a few years ago completely changed the way I look at him, and he disappears into this role just as completely. Reinsve is equally compelling, bringing a quiet panic to a mother who cannot understand how the people around her have decided that she is dangerous.
The family’s parenting is not beyond criticism. They spank their children on the bum as discipline when they fail to say their daily prayers and partake in Bible study. Of course, just because parents have some punishment methods that are culturally unacceptable, does not mean that that is grounds for removing their children for months without meaningful due process, exploiting language barriers, manipulating statements, and then using the children’s bond with a foster family as an argument for keeping them away forever.
That distinction seems to be getting lost in the conversation around the movie. I was genuinely surprised when another critic came out of the screening saying that Fjord was good, but that they were not sure whom to empathize with. The film’s leftist characters repeatedly mock the family’s Christian beliefs and treat their religious conservatism as proof of inferiority. During the trial, the prosecutor takes every opportunity to belittle Mihai, while the foster parent talks about the children’s old restrictions on YouTube and video games as if those are relevant evidence in a case about physical abuse.
This is not a defense of every belief the family holds. It’s stated that one of the children tells a classmate that being gay is a sin and that she will go to hell, which is cruel and has no place in a school. But Fjord is asking why compassion seems to run in only one direction. The film even shows the daughter of one of the secular authorities harming herself, with no comparable institutional investigation into the parenting around her. You can disagree with a family’s values and still understand that destroying their family is not automatically an act of liberation.
Cristian Mungiu’s direction makes the bureaucracy feel almost surreal in its casual cruelty. The scene where teachers sit Lisbet down and tell her that her children are being taken that night is devastating. They try to trick her into making an admission about her husband, and the Norwegian flag blows through the window behind her, filling the frame like a visual punchline. The film’s gloomy, beautiful Scandinavian landscapes create the same contradiction. Everything looks calm and civilized while this family’s life is being dismantled.
There are quieter images that stayed with me too. A woman pushes a stroller with her baby while her friend pushes an elderly man in a wheelchair. The film never explains the shot, because it does not need to. That is the cycle of life: we need to be pushed when we are young, and we may need to be pushed again when we are old. I also loved the developing friendship between the family’s older children and the daughter of the principal. The kids are able to see one another as people even while the adults build entire moral systems around their differences.
Fjord won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and I completely understand why. It is a frustrating, provocative, beautifully made film that made me feel the pain, anguish, absurdity, and helplessness of its characters on a deep level. It is also a strong awards contender if enough people give it the time it demands. The people walking away from this movie saying it depicts a gripping moral dilemma are telling on themselves. The joke is on them, because there is no doubt what the director is intending to say with this project – the challenge is if an audience can extend empathy for folks they do not agree with. Seems like a lot of audiences are failing.
I give Fjord an A.
