Romanian director and Palme laureate Cristian Mungiu – the winner here in 2007 with his stunning 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days – comes to Cannes with an anticlimactic, underpowered movie which it seems to me could be part of an odd phenomenon at this year’s festival, detectable also in films here by Kantemir Balagov and Ryusuke Hamaguchi: auteurs making coproduction movies outside their home turf and mother tongue with big foreign stars, perhaps as a result of creative conversations at international film festivals with admirers from all over the world – and losing focus.
Fjord is an odd film, bearing Mungiu’s signature, certainly, with enigmatic long shots and avoidance of closeups, and one very distinctive crowding of faces in a dinner-scene tableau. But the ostensible pain and trauma of its story is conveyed without the rewarding complexity that we have come to associate with him, and without revelation or mystery. Ultimately, the film does not compellingly deliver a blazing truth about its various relationships – but neither does it intriguingly withhold any such truth from us.
Sebastian Stan plays a Romanian guy called Mihai, married to a Norwegian woman called Lisbet (Renate Reinsve); they have to come to live in the beautiful, remote village of Lisbet’s birth because Mihai, a qualified software engineer, can get an IT job and there is a strong church community thereabouts which is a great attraction as Mihai and Lisbet are fundamentalist conservative Christians who are very strict. They are given a warm welcome by their (non-Christian) neighbours, who are the school’s headteacher and his wife.
