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Fjord Review: Anatomy of a Slap
Don’t be such a sheep.
That’s how an unruly preteen named Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olsen) taunts her new friend Elia (Vanessa Ceban), goading her to jump out a not-very-high window. As rebellions go, it’s not a dramatic one, but Elia’s parents, Mihai (Sebastian Stan) and Lisbet (Renate Reinsve), run a tight ship. They have to, they say, with five children underfoot, the youngest just a few months old. We gather, too, that in Mihai’s home country – Romania, where the family lived until they emigrate to Lisbet’s native Norway at film’s beginning – the cultural norm is perhaps less permissive when it comes to kids acting out. There is also the matter of their religion – the Gheorghius are Pentecostal Christians – which certainly influences the parents’ attitudes about discipline and the moral education of their tiny flock.
That context is all key, if not the whole picture, to Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, which won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes. (That makes Mungiu the rare filmmaker to win the prize twice, having been recognized for his abortion drama 4 Months, 2 Weeks and 2 Days in 2007.) As the family settles into their new home in Norway, a village community that is nevertheless plugged into the internet and strives to keep religion out of schools and the workplace, we intuit ways the Gheorghius’ values do not align with their adopted homeland. That comes to a head when a teacher overhears a fight between Elia and her brother that suggests she was hit by her mother, followed by another teacher spying a bruise on Elia’s upper back. Those discoveries set in motion a chain of events that alerts Child Protective Services, upending their lives.
There are ways that Fjord not superficially recalls another recent Palme d’Or winner, Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall: in the snowy remoteness, the forcible separation of parent and child combined with the unimaginable pressure to testify for or against a parent, the challenges for an accused person when criminal and legal proceedings are in a language not native to them, and most especially in the lingering question of but did they do it??
The film’s observational camera, which limits the kind of close-ups that encourage an emotional connection with characters, at first suggests Mungiu is planting a flag in Switzerland, so to speak, neutral on whether or not abuse actually occurred. Crucially, whatever contact Lisbet made with Elia (a slap? a shove? a protective push away from a boiling pot?) happens partially obscured by a wall. Later, Mihai concedes he’s given his children a slap on the butt in the past, but we don’t witness any spankings, nor can we judge if a “a slap” means something else to a man who speaks Romanian first, English second, and Norwegian only a little.
That uncertainty gooses the film with a prickling unease and the tantalizing anticipation of a cerebral mystery. Alas, that’s a red herring. As the family separation drags on (inspired, it appears, by a real-life court case), Fjord seems more determined to illustrate the overreaches of progressivism, especially via a couple clumsy characterizations that leave a sour taste. Interesting then, if Mangiu wanted to make a movie about religious persecution, or the dangers of “sheep people” ignoring nuance in service of principle, that he keeps his camera at a clinical remove, arm’s length away even as a mother has her breastfeeding infant removed from her home.
And it is interesting; how could it not be, in this land of casual avalanches and provocative questions raised about what is legal, what is fair, and what is right? The performances are uniformly outstanding, most especially that of Reinsve and Stan, reining in the luminosity of their most famous roles (her edgy, electric turn in The Worst Person in the World; his Bucky/Winter Soldier swivels between grinning then automaton in the MCU pictures). More interesting yet is who Mungiu gives the film’s final moment to. That moment is open to all kinds of interpretation. I read it as secular – and welcomed the mystery.
Fjord2026, R, 146 min. Directed by Cristian Mungiu. Starring Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve, Lisa Carlehed, Vanessa Ceban, Henrikke Lund-Olsen, Jonathan Ciprian Breazu, Markus Scarth Tønseth.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3.5 out of 5.The post Fjord Review: Anatomy of a Slap appeared first on The Austin Chronicle.