Fjord, after winning this year’s Palme D’or at Cannes Film Festival, was my most anticipated showing of BFI’s London Film Festival and while it is compelling and identifies some fascinating issues, I came away feeling that these were not fully explored and therefore were difficult to resolve.
Fjord centres around Mihai (Sebastian Stan) and his wife Lisbet (Renate Reinsve) who have recently moved from Romania to Norway to be closer to Lisbet’s family. The couple are devout evangelical Christians who uphold very traditional beliefs, which they hope to pass on to their children, but the values that give Mihai a sense of moral certainty also endanger to distance him from reality and the society in which he lives. When Elia, the couple’s eldest daughter, goes to school with bruises on her back, Child Protection Services are called, and the family finds itself caught in an investigation that will see their five children taken out of their custody.
This investigation opens by questioning parental responsibility but gradually turns into a trial between two opposing visions of what it means to protect and take care of someone. An attorney is hired when the couple begin to believe that CPS was called due to religious discrimination. Norway is well-known to be tolerant and progressive making this problem particularly interesting as while they celebrate freedom, they remain suspicious of those whose beliefs fall outside the boundaries of their own.
This film challenges its audience to empathise with people who uphold beliefs they most likely disagree with. It sits comfortably in morality’s grey areas – what is right and what is wrong when it comes to punishment and prejudice – and refuses to give its audience easy answers. Unfortunately, the difficulty to find any answers and the hardship of deciding what is right prevents the film and its ideas from reaching their full potential.
Refusing to reduce this important conflict to a simple verdict is admirable and Cristian Mungiu has done an excellent job when it comes to raising questions about tolerance, power, religion, and institutional prejudice. His examination of societal decay is incredible. However, because the film holds such a tight control over its ideas and the consequences of the investigation, I left the cinema feeling like there were so many more conversations to be had and ideas to be rounded up. While it does feel long at times, I would have appreciated a more well-rounded conclusion and answer to unspoken questions.
As expected, Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve are the standouts here and deliver two nuanced and restrained performances that made me feel uncomfortable while constantly shifting my sympathy from one side to another.
Fjord is visually outstanding in its setting and utilises the quiet landscape of the Norwegian Fjords to make the audience feel captivated at all times. Using the beauty of the fjords to contrast the growing unease of the story is very effective. The widescreen shots of the isolated setting initially establish a sense of piece yet this becomes increasingly unsettling as the tensions intensify. Wider angle shots and keeping the camera at a distance from the protagonists places them in their surroundings rather than focusing on expressive close-ups to dictate our emotional response. It could be argued that this distance makes us feel detached from the drama but I never saw it that way. The quiet makes us question what we are thinking at every given moment and the clash between progressivism and tradition sat with me for a long time after leaving the cinema, which shows its impact.
Fjord is out in UK cinemas November 13th
