16th July 2017 - GRADUATION

 

GRADUATION
A Film by Cristian Mungiu
2016, Romania, 123 minutes
16^th 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