Fjord, a provocative drama from Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, tackles the difficult subject of child abuse, turning it into a springboard for examining cultural conflict and rigid institutional power.
Sebastian Stan portrays Mihai, a Romanian father who moves to Norway with his Norwegian wife (Renate Reinsve) and their five children. An aeronautical engineer by trade, Mihai has taken a low-level IT job. Reinsve’s Lisbet works at a local senior center, where she often comforts those who lose loved ones.
Well known to festival audiences, Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) has written a screenplay that quickly plunges Mihai into a crisis. School authorities accuse him of child abuse.
The case begins when a teacher notices that Elia (one of Mihai’s daughters) has a bruised cheek. Mihai and his wife are then pitted against child protection authorities who see only one side of the story. They refuse to acknowledge that Romanian standards of parental control may differ from Norway's.
For his part, Mihai admits that in rare instances, he slaps his kids on the butt. In Norway, spanking is banned by law.
During the ensuing investigation, Mihai and Lisbet's five children, including an infant, are removed from their home and placed in foster care.
The school’s headmaster (Markus Scarth Tonseth) seems like an even-handed fellow. As one of Mihai and Lisbet’s neighbors, he warmly welcomes them to the small town but finds himself pushed by the school's child protection officer to allow the case to proceed.
Sincere in his religious beliefs, Mihai articulates his positions clearly and without compromise, but he’s never wild-eyed about them. He believes he's inculcating moral values in his kids that will serve them well throughout their lives. He's staunch in his beliefs, but Stans wisely keeps him from becoming an ogre.
As the story develops, the initially welcoming townsfolk begin to stand against the family. After firing an insensitive lawyer, Mihai and Lisbet turn to one of their neighbors, a lawyer (Lisa Carlehed) who handles the civil case against them. She happens to be married to the school's head master.
Carlehed's character acknowledges that outsiders can never be sure what happens in families, but questions the case against Mihai. The bruises on his daughter’s face could have resulted from a wrestling session at school, for example.
Elia (Vanessa Ceban), the daughter in question, befriends Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olsen), the lawyer's daughter, a teenager who tries to coax Elia into activities that cut against the grain of the family's religious beliefs, which the kids take seriously.
Mungiu may be more interested in challenging dogmatic approaches than in getting to the bottom of Mihai's story, which was inspired by a real case. Mungiu seems to be saying that once a value-laden issue becomes entangled in a rule-oriented system, possibilities for a truly human solutions diminish.
Put another way, the film allows for some ambiguity, but becomes a cautionary tale about the dangers of believing in the absolute rightness of one's position.
Does the film show what can happen when religious and cultural beliefs are challenged by members of civil society? Yes. Is the case Mungiu has chosen an instructive but isolated example or does it reveal something more general about those who administer Norwegian child protection policies? I'm not sure.
For me, not being able to answer the latter questions weakens an otherwise complex and involving drama that Mungiu directs with assurance, restraint, and sobering austerity.
