Like most of his films, Cristian Mungiu’s Graduation takes place under gray skies with characters immersed in heavy, Soviet-era architecture. It’s the kind of environment and history that’s hard to escape.
The picture opens in an apartment in the city of Cluj. A balanced shot just stares at the living room; there are no people. The camera doesn’t move, as if it’s waiting for something to happen. Suddenly a rock comes through the window. It’s not a major crime, of course; it’s a minor transgression. But over the course of the picture, a series of mini-attacks up the ante on the tension.
Romeo Aldea (Adrian Titieni) is a middle-aged medical doctor. His marriage is pretty much dead; he visits an impatient 35-year-old girlfriend, and he adores his daughter Eliza (Maria Dragus). He’ll do anything for her – and that’s a problem.
She’s been attacked, almost raped. Her wrist is in a cast, and she’s shook up. She’s about to graduate from high school and has to take a set of exams that will determine if she gets a scholarship to Cambridge University in England. Romeo has done a favor for a man, and now he asks that man to get the right person to make an exception for Eliza because of the attack and let her take the exam later.
Romeo’s life is a mass of complications – wife, girlfriend, daughter, his obsession that Eliza go to England. Plus whoever threw the rock continues the minor assaults on his car. But Romeo just plods along; his expression doesn’t change. He oozes past one crisis after another, but he can’t solve anything. They all just weigh him down.
Director Cristian Mungiu presents a Romania struggling to break out of the old ways of doing things – the old indirect, evasive Soviet-period ways. Romeo makes constant trades and bargains, all of them compromised. He has a reputation for honesty, but a patient he’s helped slips him an envelope with cash; he gets advice on how to have his daughter cheat the system. Eliza’s boyfriend says that everyone cheats on final exams. The frail wife Romeo is about to leave, says, “Being fair comes with a price, and I was willing to pay it.” Romeo is not, at least when it comes to his daughter.
Mungiu, who made the startling Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, about an abortion, holds off on overt moral judgments. He keeps his camera steady on long conversations, and these shots show how potent filming can be when the camera isn’t bouncing around like a nervous teenager. People make their arrangements in the foreground, while in the background, other people cross back and forth going about their lives. Children play; there are grass and trees out the window. It’s an invitation to escape from the intricate trading of favors by people like Romeo, who lock themselves indoors and have to suffer the mounting consequences of bad short-term choices.
After a tough encounter with his wife, Romeo walks to the back, into the next room. The shot holds on the scene, the forlorn and now abandoned woman in the foreground, Romeo in the back – and in your gut you know that neither of them has figured out how to live properly in a place of constant moral point shaving.
The urgency comes because both parents love their daughter, but differently. Magda, the wife, insists that Eliza has to play by the rules and deal with how things happen. Romeo wants his daughter to win, which means that she gets to leave Romania for an England Romeo imagines is the promised land. That’s how badly he wants Eliza out of the morass of Romania.
Romeo takes a photo of Eliza and her friends at graduation. They are all smiling. It’s terrifying because you can’t know if Eliza will find a way to escape the burdens created by her father’s desire to set her free.
