GRADUATION
A Film by Cristian Mungiu
2016, Romania, 123 minutes
16th July, 5.45 pm , Perks Mini Theater
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in/
A Film by Cristian Mungiu
2016, Romania, 123 minutes
16th July, 5.45 pm , Perks Mini Theater
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in/
A fascinating and fastidiously
complex study of one man’s moral choices at a crucial juncture in his life,
Cristian Mungiu’s “Graduation” is a thoroughgoing masterpiece which offers
proof that Romania’s cinematic upsurge remains the most vital and important
national film movement of the current century.
Mungiu’s protagonist this time is
a doctor named Romeo Aldea, who is about to turn 50, which means that he’s
reached a certain mid-point in life: young enough to have an aged mother
needing his attention, old enough to have a daughter about to graduate from
high school. Other signs of mid-life’s challenges: he’s got a wife who’s as
romantically alienated from him as he is from her and a mistress who’s
threatening to end things if he doesn’t leave the wife for her. Of these four
women, it’s the daughter, Eliza, who becomes the film’s dramatic crux as the
story begins.
Romeo tries to take measures into his
own hands when he starts to fear his daughter won’t score the high grades she
needs on her final exams. Believing that a scholarship to a British university
is the girl’s best chance to flee the corruption and despair of their own
country, he finds himself becoming what he hates most – someone who tries to
game a corrupt system. But this is not a man who suddenly finds his worldviews
compromised; rather, he fancies himself an idealist, above deceit and graft.
Mungiu’s characters are never
really clean, however. The system around them sucks, but they’re part of that
system, too. In Graduation, that realization slowly sneaks up on you. The film
pulls you into the characters’ competing webs of lies, but it never loses sight
of their self-justifications. The people of “Graduation” are all very
believable, both persuasively Romanian and recognizable to anyone in the
middle-class West. Which is to say that Mungiu shows us lives that reflect
certain looming social forces but that also are too messy and individual to add
up to neat moral lessons. (Source:Internet )
Cristian Mungiu
Cristian Mungiu was born in Iași, in 1968. After studying
English Literature at university, he worked as a teacher and journalist for the
written press, radio and television. He then attended the Film and Theatre
Academy in Bucharest and first feature film, Occident, premiered at the
Directors’ Fortnight in 2002 and was a triumph back in Romania. In 2007, his
second film, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days was awarded the Palme d’or. The film
received and won several international distinctions.or. He returned to Cannes
in 2009 as a writer-producer-co-director with the collective film Tales from
the Golden Age and as a writer-director in 2012 with Beyond the Hills – double
awarded for Best Screenplay and Best Actresses. He was a member of the Jury
headed by Steven Spielberg at the 66th Festival de Cannes (2013). Graduation –
his fifth film presented in Cannes – won the award for Best Director in 2016.
- http://www.festival-cannes.com
