How Fjord handed Cristian Mungiu a second Palme d’Or for filming a family no system can read

The question that ran under the whole competition was whether a jury would reward a film that refuses to take a side, and Fjord answered it. Cristian Mungiu built his Palme d’Or winner around a Romanian Evangelical couple who move to the wife’s remote Norwegian hometown and discover that the way they raise their children reads, to the local welfare authorities, as abuse. Neither the parents nor the state is written as a monster. That is the whole bet, and it is the hardest kind to pull off.

What the film is actually arguing is that institutions and families both believe they speak for the child, and that the child disappears in the gap between them. Mungiu has spent his career on exactly this terrain — the bureaucratic machinery of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, the school-corruption procedure of Graduation — and Fjord moves it across a border, where the clash is no longer one society arguing with itself but two value systems that cannot even agree on what counts as harm.

Critics at Cannes singled out the control. This is Mungiu’s first film in English, and the language switch did not soften the long, unbroken takes and the refusal to score the audience’s emotions for them that have defined his work. Sebastian Stan plays the father as a man whose certainty is also his trap; Renate Reinsve, returning to the festival that helped make her, plays the mother as the one who first senses the ground giving way. The casting is the argument: two performers audiences associate with very different registers, made to share a single moral pressure.

Recommended ReadingMungiu’s Fjord takes a second Palme d’Or as Cannes splits Best Director between Los Javis and Pawlikowski

The win caps a specific arc. Mungiu becomes the tenth director to take two Palmes, nineteen years after his first, and he did it by leaving the Romanian-language realism that defined the New Wave he helped lead — without abandoning a frame of its rigor. For Neon, the distributor that has now won the top prize seven years running, Fjord is another data point in a pattern that has stopped looking like luck.

What it does not resolve is the thing it is honest enough to leave open. The film declines to tell the viewer which authority should win, and some will read that even-handedness as evasion rather than maturity — a refusal to name corporal punishment for what the law calls it. That argument is built into the film rather than solved by it, and it is the reason the conversation around Fjord will not end with the ceremony.

The forward path is unusually clear for a Palme winner. Mungiu’s English-language move plus two recognisable leads gives Neon a film that travels past the festival circuit, and an awards-season run with Stan and Reinsve as its faces is the obvious next chapter. Fjord opens wide later in the year; the harder question — whether a film this committed to discomfort can hold a mainstream audience as firmly as it held the jury — is the one the release will answer.

More Like This

How Minotaur brought Andrey Zvyagintsev from exile to the Cannes Grand Prix

How All of a Sudden made Cannes split Best Actress between Efira and Okamoto

Titane — Julia Ducournau bets body horror works better when it refuses to explain itself

The Crash on Netflix argues a teenager planned a 100-mph collision the adults around her read as adolescent drama

Cape Fear forces American cinema’s most uncomfortable question

Kenji Tanigaki drops Joe Taslim and Xie Miao inside The Furious, a pan-Asian revenge