Romanian director Cristian Mungiu grabbed international attention and the Palme d’Or with his 2007 pregnancy drama FOUR MONTHS, THREE WEEKS, AND TWO DAYS. That harrowing film presented a tour through Romanian creaky bureaucracy and a murky underworld of bribes and corruption in a story built on a controversial topic. In the director’s latest film GRADUATION, the subject is less heated, but it also explores the difficulties of life in Romania.
GRADUATION (“Bacalaureat”) centers on a doctor trying to ensure his straight-A student daughter’s best chance at a college scholarship in England, while showing the challenges and complexities of life in Romania. The subject is more universal – the desire of parents for the child to do well – but also paints a bleak picture of Romania life. The drama offers a subtle psychological and moral exploration set against a telling expose of a culture of corruption. At the same time, GRADUATION is a less dramatic and driven film that the director’s 2007 emotional juggernaut.
One thing that might be a challenge for some audiences is that GRADUATION seems so preoccupied with presenting the many difficulties of life in Romania, that it is well into the film before we are sure about the drama’s real focus. The film opens with a rock thrown through a living room window of a modest apartment in a drab modern apartment complex. The apartment is the modest home of Dr. Romeo Aldea (Adrian Titieni), his librarian wife Magda (Lia Bugnar), and their daughter Eliza (Maria Dragus, from Michael Hanneke’s WHITE RIBBON), and the small apartment and broken window hints at the difficulty of life in Romania.
The couple’s only child is on the verge of graduating high school, needing only to complete her final exams with a high score to win a scholarship to England. The girl is bright and hard-working, a good girl with good grades, and the doctor and his wife seem to have built their life around the daughter’s success, and escape to life in the West. There is a desperation in their ambitions for their child. They have done everything they can to ensure her success – picking the right school, advanced lessons in English, extra study sessions. She seems certain to win the scholarship that will take her to a new, more promising life far from Romania’s crime, corruption and economic stagnation.
But a day before the three-day final exam begins, something terrible happens. The daughter is assaulted on the way to school. She escapes the attempted rape but is traumatized and suffers a sprained wrist. The school officials decline to postpone the critical exams or even give her extra time to complete it. The crisis places her father in difficult situation: should he violate the standards of honesty and integrity by which he raised his daughter or should he reach into the pool of deal-making and corruption around them, to ensure she passes the test and escapes Romania’s broken system?
That moral dilemma is the heart of the drama and it also reveals details about the parents’ lives and their marriage as it harshly explores the difficulties of life in Romania. Unfortunately, the film takes awhile to let us know that, and sometimes seems unfocused and wandering. The assault is not the only obstacle to Dr. Aldea’s hopes for his daughter. She also has a low-achieving motorcycle-riding boyfriend who might distract her from her goals. Meanwhile, the police investigation of the attack, which several witnesses ignored, is not going well. At first, we are unsure what this drama is really about: The assault on the daughter? Crime in Romania? Corruption? Lack of economic opportunity? Coming of age? All play some role in the story but the parents’ ambitions for their daughter, the personal story under that, eventually emerge as the main point.
The acting is a highlight of this thoughtful drama, particularly Titieni as the father. The scenes between the father and daughter are believable and taut, but those with his depressed wife are the most heart-breaking. The doctor’s life is more complicated that it appears at first and compromise has been part of that , even while he has tried to hold on to some ethics.
Of course, the doctor has underlying motivations from his own life behind those hopes and plans for his daughter. Having returned to his native Romania after graduating medical school with hopes of making it better, he and his wife now feel that was a mistake, one they want their daughter to avoid. Of course, there are pitfalls in parents living out their ambitions through their children. The drama also delves into the dynamic of the couple’s marriage and their disappointments, personal and professional. In the process in life, the film explores the moral dilemma the father faces in possibly asking his daughter to violate the principle by which he raised her.
Apart from the attack on daughter and a few other moments, GRADUATION lacks the dramatic drive and gripping energy of the director’s early film. The film is a thoughtful mediation on moral choices but it is also rather rambling and low-key, often focused on quiet conversations, subtle scenes, and offering less-heated, more resigned social commentary. For those with the patience, GRADUATION does have something to say, on moral choices, diminished expectations in an Eastern European nation, parental hopes of children, and the urge to emigrate, among other things, but the low-key, less-focused approach may not keep all audiences totally engaged.
