Cristian Mungiu’s Graduation is a chilly, relentless film: tragedy as vivisection, with bleached-out visuals that all seem to have the clinical florescent glare of hospital lights. The subject on the table is Dr. Romeo Aldea (Adrian Titieni), whose complacency–about his own respectability and decency, about his understanding of the world and people around him, and about his family’s stability–is first disturbed, then shaken, and then entirely overthrown.
Mungiu plots neatly and sparingly, knowing how few actions it takes to unravel a life. Romeo longs to get his eighteen-year-old daughter, Eliza (Maria Dragus), out of Romania, where opportunities are scarce, poverty is common, and corruption is routine. He wishes he hadn’t decided to stay there himself, but he’s settled now; he has a position of authority, a hard-earned middle-class existence, and a mistress. He has, most of all, a sense of who he is. A good man, a good father, a good doctor. Respectable.
Then Eliza is accosted just before her final exams. Her assailant sprains her wrist, and the injury and accompanying cast slow her writing. Even aside from that, her lingering trauma makes it hard to predict whether she’ll be clearheaded enough to get her usual high results. Her scholarship to Cambridge hangs in the balance, and suddenly, Romeo has to make choices about what he will do to ensure his daughter’s success. He finds himself methodically giving away piece after piece of his identity, and the struts holding up his life collapse one by one.
That would be enough for a top-notch tragedy, but Mungiu–in a choice that makes the film both less traditionally satisfying and more unsettling–kicks those struts away too. Tragedy is ennobling, and Romeo’s decline means that he loses even that. He has to eventually grapple with the fact that his choices and sacrifices aren’t the governing dramatic force; no matter what he does, he is not in control here. He doesn’t have the luxury of grandeur. If we can find a note of hope for him at the end, it’s that he at last accepts that loss of control; our final glimpse of Romeo is him as observer, not subject. He’s ceding the story to someone else.
Graduation is streaming on Kanopy.
