A broken window figures prominently in Graduation, the latest from the Romanian auteur Cristian Mungiu. The film is about a well-meaning doctor and the dubious stratagems he uses to help his distracted teenage daughter get the marks she needs after she is attacked on the street the day before her final exams. Adding to this anxious parent's sense of dread, a stone comes through their living-room window early in the action, but the culprit is never uncovered and the incident is not mentioned again.
When Mungiu visited the Toronto International Film Festival last September with Graduation, which is now opening locally, I asked him about that unsolved mystery. He responded with a telling anecdote about subjectivity.
After mixing the film in Paris last year, he sat down with his French distributor. "He knows a lot about cinema. He liked the film a lot, but after we had a bottle of wine he started to say: 'I'm sorry; there is just one thing to tell you. We don't live in the sixties any more. This is not the nouvelle vague. People want to know today; they want to have all the answers. There is only one thing I don't like: It's not crystal clear who threw the stone.'"
Mungiu told him to watch the film again more closely. Meanwhile, a month later Graduation was accepted into competition for Cannes; festival director Thierry Frémaux relayed a message back to Mungiu full of enthusiasm but did want to add one criticism: "It's a little too clear who threw the stone."
How much ambiguity can an audience tolerate? How much complexity might it demand? The answer, in Mungiu's Eastern European brand of neo-realism, is probably about as much as the characters do. Graduation leaves the viewer with several other apparent puzzles – is the doctor being followed? Where was the daughter's boyfriend at the time of the attack? Why does she hesitate to identify anyone in the police lineup? – as Mungiu builds up an atmosphere of uncertainty and foreboding.
"Part of the ambiguity that is in the film comes from the ambiguity in life," Mungiu said. "Life is sort of complex and ambiguous and you don't have all the answers you want to have at the end of the day."
Maria-Victoria Dragus plays Romeo’s daughter in Graduation.
Courtesy of GAT
The most difficult questions the characters have to answer are ethical ones: Graduation is partly a film about parental anxiety and partly one about moral compromise as the good doctor Romeo, his middle-aged mix of stress and competency carefully detailed by actor Adrian Titieni, tries to barter his way to a solution for the increasingly disengaged Eliza, dragging them both down a moral spiral.
In that regard, Graduation can be read as a indictment of a corrupt society and closely compared to 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a film about a young woman trying to get an abortion in Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania that proved the director's critical breakthrough in 2007.
But almost 30 years after Ceausescu's execution, Mungiu sees disappointment and compromise as being a human story rather than a specifically post-Communist one. After all, what country doesn't suffer from the "It's not what you know but who you know" phenomenon?
"The film should just be a story about human nature, about this situation and the relationships involved," Mungiu insists. "For me, it's a lot about … this [middle] age when you start feeling a bit disappointed and guilty. … You are the result of all the decisions you have made in your life and this is the way it goes: It will never be bright and shiny again."
Graduation is partly a film about parental anxiety and partly one about moral compromise for Adrian Titieni’s character Romeo.
Courtesy of GAT
In that regard, loose ends represent a kind of cinematic honesty for Mungiu, who points out the length of a film can hardly be expected to encompass or even summarize all the characters' experience. "This is what cinema should be about: It's about attitude, not about clarifying what happened in those 90 minutes. The story is way bigger than that … and you have to let the spectator figure it out."
Interestingly, Mungiu achieves this naturalism, which includes poignantly unaffected performances from his cast, through extremely exacting methods. He declines to work with amateur actors but casts professionals partly by appearance, asking for family and Facebook photos rather than their posed publicity shots, and auditions them through conversations about their personal lives. Once cast, they rehearse scenes again and again, first for the lines and then for specific gestures. Mungiu does numerous takes for each scene but is often planning to capture a complete scene in a single, uninterrupted shot, eschewing the dramatic cuts and edits that scream movie.
So, there is nothing improvised or unplanned about his process and, yet, the result is the mess of life.
Graduation opens June 2 in Toronto at the TIFF Lightbox (tiff.net).