{"id":678035,"date":"2026-05-18T18:51:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T18:51:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/678035\/"},"modified":"2026-05-18T18:51:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T18:51:09","slug":"fjord-review-cristian-mungiu-at-sea-with-strange-child-abuse-drama-starring-renate-reinsve-and-sebastian-stan-cannes-film-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/678035\/","title":{"rendered":"Fjord review – Cristian Mungiu at sea with strange child abuse drama starring Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan | Cannes film festival"},"content":{"rendered":"

Romanian director and Palme laureate Cristian Mungiu \u2013 the winner here in 2007 with his stunning 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days<\/a> \u2013 comes to Cannes with an anticlimactic, underpowered movie which it seems to me could be part of an odd phenomenon at this year\u2019s 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 \u2013 and losing focus.<\/p>\n

Fjord is an odd film, bearing Mungiu\u2019s 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 \u2013 but neither does it intriguingly withhold any such truth from us. <\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019s headteacher and his wife.<\/p>\n

The film begins on a disquieting, ambiguous moment: Mihai has clearly just delivered a punishment of some sort to their teenage daughter who is now required to give him a penitent hug. The school\u2019s staff notice that the children have marks and bruises. They are gently but pointedly questioned and (perhaps) incriminate their parents because they are not sufficiently proficient in any language other than Romanian. Perhaps the language issue also contributes to the calamitous statement Mihai then gives to the police with no lawyer present.<\/p>\n

With lightning speed, the children are taken into provisional care pending a hearing and criminal trial. Things are complicated by a growing concern about their neighbours\u2019 elderly disabled father and about Mihai and Lisbet\u2019s daughter forming a close relationship with their neighbours\u2019 rebellious teen daughter.<\/p>\n

There is something undoubtedly ingenious in the way Mungiu invites the audience to sympathise with the children, and side against this ice-cold patriarch \u2013 and then almost side with the patriarch against the blandly smug, supercilious officers of a system weighted against them.<\/p>\n

Liberal prejudice against them as Christians or as Romanians arguably plays its part. But the facts of the matter do not seem to be in doubt: Mihai concedes he smacks or slaps the children occasionally \u2013 quite normal in the robust world of Romania. But don\u2019t those bruises and marks show something worse than that? The matter is not resolved in court or in the film and then we have a strangely inert and suspense-free finale at the ferry terminal which reveals that the relationship between the teen girls Elia (Vanessa Ceban) and Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olsen) is something else the film has not sufficiently told or not told us about. Mungiu\u2019s technique will always be interesting but this is a disappointment.<\/p>\n

Fjord screened at the Cannes film festival<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Romanian director and Palme laureate Cristian Mungiu \u2013 the winner here in 2007 with his stunning 4 Months,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":678036,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,337],"class_list":["post-678035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=678035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678035\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/678036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=678035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=678035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=678035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}