Graduation

To what friend and colleague Enšpígl said about this film is actually something that fits perfectly with the current Romanian wave. Romanian films are currently very voyeuristic. The camera sticks to the back of a father who is attacked somewhere in the park by strangers who try to force his daughter to enroll in an English school to leave Romania. He does everything he can to make it happen. Emotions from the ever-increasing problems are coming from all directions, and I am amazed that the old man did not blow his brains out during the film for peace of mind. So you can count on this film being quite critical of current Romania, which as a viewer unfamiliar with Romania, I am happy to hear, and I am glad to learn something interesting about Romania. The huge success of this film is the subject, its development, but also the length, which finally does not border on three hours, which I have also experienced a few times in Romania in recent years, and that there is something to watch because young Maria Dragus clearly held her own with her father in her role. (06/30/2021)

Do you know the saying that anything that can go wrong will go wrong? So the Graduation is a movie about that everything what can possibly go wrong will. And not only once but multiple times. Mungiu is really good at making movies, that's for sure. The problem is that, as in the case of 4 months, the escalating personal tragedy itself serves as a means of reflecting the society and the conditions. But where in 4 months it went nicely hand in hand together and it was always mainly about those characters, it works here in an exact opposite way. As if the story only served as a justification for more and more overlapping comments and the fate of a doctor whose journey to hell is paved with good intentions, are somehow extra and sidelined here. And it is in the mode of "I go after this and that, bit by bit I retreat from my principles and succumb to the corruption that is on every corner and I'm more and more stuck in a self-destructive spiral" considerably repetitive or in other words kind of annoying *boring*. (07/14/2016)

Somehow I can't get along with the Romanian New Wave. It bothers me that once again the film becomes a movie in the last act, when before it was just an exposition of the bleak relationships and conditions in contemporary Romania. And this is shot in a raw, civil method with very few clues, where the only thing that holds your interest is the promise of an ending where everything comes full circle. While this method has its perks, here capitalizing especially on the scenes of the horrific relationship between the protagonist and his wife, it makes each scene lack anything more than that first layer, where the two figurines pass on information that will be useful in the final reckoning (which, fortunately, doesn't come, which is quite nice). Moreover, it seems to me that contemporary Romanian cinema is floundering in the same "desperate, stupid people in a desperate, stupid country" morass over and over again and not really going anywhere. Which actually makes the film thematize itself in an arch way. Isn't that fun? Well, actually, not much. (07/20/2017)

51st KVIFF - exactly what you expect from Mungiu, nothing more than that, unfortunately. (07/06/2016)