Festival de Cannes 72 Countdown: Bacalaureat / Graduation, 2016

We excitedly countdown to the 72nd Festival de Cannes with a different prize winning film each day.

Bacalaureat / Graduation, 2016

Prix de la mise en scène – Cristian Mungiu

A wishful, though woefully misguided, doctor digs a hole so deep he drags his whole family into it, in Cristian Mungiu’s 2016 Cannes competition entry Graduation. The complacency of a generation who had it bad, and never got it better, in spite of the hopes they held and the promises they heard, brings its own mistakes down upon its children in a catastrophic miscalculation of the societal climate in which the youth now resides. Short-term solutions tempt, and the ease with which this muddled middle class seeks and (debatably) achieves resolution to its myriad issues both leaves those issues unresolved and further begets a culture of dishonesty.

Graduation, which won Mungiu a Best Director prize alongside Olivier Assayas for Personal Shopper, tells of that youth and its advancement into adulthood, appropriating the same problematic approaches to life as its parents. All those parents had at that age were hopes and dreams, earnest at first, shattered at last. Their descendants know now the ease in dismissing these notions – an unknown known, thus neatly representing the blithe ignorance of every young generation in history – and betray their essential innocence and purity in the process.

A presumptive father considers said innocence in his daughter quite differently, and the extent of his misunderstanding wreaks turmoil on her life. The unsolicited stranglehold of a parent, or of a husband, or an authority figure, and mostly of men and their antiquated attitudes toward women. These are crippling dangers from which there is no escape in the all-encompassing corruption of modern-day Romania. The collective back-scratching fails to appreciate the legacy it leaves, in those who must necessarily lose out, as a select few seem to win.

Provocative and tantalizing suggestion and abstraction decorate Cristian Mungiu’s remarkably rich, detailed drama. Which is otherwise notable for its apparent austerity. It’s nothing of the sort, only a manifestation of the astonishing control this filmmaker exerts over his films, particularly piquant here, as he depicts the loss of control of a bewildered man. Bolstered by the virtues he assigns to himself, bloated by the vices whose admission he relentlessly resists. Mungiu’s formal excellence only appears to take a supporting role to Graduation’s more complex narrative content (in comparison to his other works), though the separation of the two here only emphasises what qualities each possess.

Alas, emphasising one’s own technical brilliance as a director rarely makes for subtle cinema, though what need for subtlety when said cinema is so strong? Mungiu indeed uses his skills in spatial blocking, ambient sound design, eyeline perspective, to enrich Graduation’s thematic content, not to distract from it. The paranoia and personal dislocation bred by this clinically ambitious, emotionally negligent approach to society. An approach that Mungiu keenly situates in his country’s troubled recent past, and is communicated exquisitely by such formal devices.

Mungiu has been to Cannes three times (excluding 2009’s anthology Tales from the Golden Age, on which he was one of five directors), each time competing for the Palme d’Or. And each time returning to the prize ceremony for, respectively, a Palme itself for 2007’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a joint Best Actress prize for his leads Cristina Flutur and Cosmina Stratan for 2012’s Beyond the Hills, and the aforementioned Best Director prize for Graduation.

His brand of stern, po-faced naturalism is precisely the kind of thing cherished by Festival Director Thierry Frémaux (and often by critics, though some have grown weary of it of late), though it’s also precisely the kind of thing that Mungiu does so well, you forgive it its sternness and its po-facedness. Graduation is both of those things, yet so much more: it’s intellectually challenging, emotionally thrilling, stylistically striking, riveting cinema. If he keeps on making movies like this, I’ll never grow weary of it.