Graduation

Romanian films have a way of being relentless voyeurs. The camera clings to the back of a father whose daughter is assaulted in a park, just as he’s trying to force her into an English school to get her out of Romania. He’s doing everything he can to make it happen, and the emotions from the ever-mounting problems hit you from all sides. I’m honestly surprised the poor guy didn’t lose his mind during the film. You can expect a sharp critique of contemporary Romania here, which, as someone unfamiliar with the country, I found enlightening. The film’s saving grace is its compelling story, pacing, and, thankfully, a runtime that doesn’t stretch to three hours, which I’ve seen a few too many times with Romanian cinema lately. Plus, Maria Dragus delivers a strong performance alongside her on-screen father, making it all the more watchable. (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)

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

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)