We happened to schedule our favorite, Renate Reinsve ("The Worst Person in the World," "Sentimental Value"), on back-to-back days, one streaming, one in theaters:
FJORD (B+) - Cristian Mungiu's last film, "R.M.N.," explored the tension among immigrant populations in his native Romania, and now he takes his show on the road, offering a dour drama about a Romanian immigrant and his Norwegian wife ensnared in Norway's child-protection system over the couple's fundamentalist Christian ways of teaching and disciplining their five children. Sebastian Stan, nearly unrecognizable with a bald pate, and a wrung-out Renate Reinsve carry the burden of this heavy movie that clocks in at nearly two-and-a-half hours.
It takes about an hour for Mungiu to put all his pieces in place, with the children, including a nursing infant, scattered among three foster homes during the state's investigation and the parents, Mihai (Stan) and Lisbet (Reinsve), battling both civil and criminal allegations. Frustrated by the formalized proceedings, Mihai eventually goes on the offensive, turning to Romania for a hard-nosed fixer and a right-wing journalist to kick up dust on social media among Christian conservatives, from the U.S. to Europe, to vocalize the perceived religious prosecution against these strict parents.
The best part of the movie plays out among the children, in particular the oldest, daughter Elia (Vanessa Ceban), who in the months since moving to Norway has developed an extremely close bond with classmate and neighbor Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olsen), who will slip Elia a verboten cell phone to keep in touch while Elia is in foster care. Their friendship enrages Noora's pal Elsa, to such an extent that you suspect their may be romantic feelings among the three girls -- which would be quite a shock to Elia's fundamentalist parents. In a subtle dig at prejudice, even Noora's progressive, open-minded parents fear that foreign children are corrupting Noora, when it is their daughter luring the others to sneak out and flout the oppressive rules of their house (no internet, no video games, no dancing).
It is Elia's bruises, discovered by a teacher, and her admission that her parents spank her that trigger the authorities' investigation, and once the bureaucrats dig their talons in, there seems to be little hope that Mihai and Lisbet will prevail. They convince Noora's mother, Mia (Lisa Carlehed), to represent them at the proceedings. (Noora's father, Mats, is the school headmaster.) Mia is skeptical but sympathetic, especially to Lisbet, a nurse who helps care for Mia's father-in-law, a disabled stroke survivor.
Mungiu ("Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days," "Graduation") juggles this all effortlessly. The second half is a meticulous procedural that recalls the Iranian films of Asghar Farhadi (especially "A Separation"), contrasting cold bureaucracy with cultural friction. Mungiu will likely have you questioning the long arm of the liberal nanny state while also remaining skeptical about the reactionary nature of religious fundamentalists crying discrimination (the same people who in America insist that other religions and cultures must blindly assimilate within a Christian value system). The informal civil trial is believable and nuanced. (At one point you can hear the protesters chanting outside the building while the hearing proceeds.)
That's a lot to chew on. None of this is facile or black and white. Stan broods and simmers throughout, but Mihai is not a one-dimensional bully from Eastern Europe; he seems contrite but defensive (understandably so). Reinsve, looking haggard behind eyeglasses, wisely underplays the trauma of a mother whose baby is ripped from her breast. Young Ceban and Lund-Olsen are fantastic as middle-school girls bonding amid the headwinds of adult politics and cultural chess matches.
The film is bookended by shots of avalanches rumbling eerily close to the school but never instilling panic. Life throws us challenges in many forms, and how we deal with them will shape our worldview eventually. In "Fjord," it's not so easy to separate the good guys from the bad guys or to guarantee the safety of our children. Don't expect simple answers here.
BACKROOMS (B-minus) - In the horror game, it's understandable to be derivative, but it's a sin to be boring. Newcomer Kane Parsons adapts his found-footage web series about a lost world of secret rooms that entomb the past into a painfully conventional feature film that lacks cohesion and true suspense.
Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark, a failing furniture salesman (and would-be architect) whose wife has left him, as he whines to his therapist, Mary Klein (a gaunt Renate Reinsve), who forces him to role-play arguments he had with his estranged spouse. Clark finds a permeable wall in the lower level of his store, and it leads him to parallel dimension, made up of a warren of storage spaces bathed in yellow walls and carpet. He can't leave well enough alone, so he recruits his two young, underpaid employees to join him to explore the space, and their expedition goes horribly wrong.
A sampling of the web series, available as 23 episodes (some just a minute or two long) on YouTube, suggests a disjointed analog video experiment full of fascinating ephemera. (It appears to take place in 1990.) That obtuse sci-fi exercise gets ironed out into a linear Hollywood narrative, which makes it palatable to the masses but drains it of its unique appeal.
Clark, who drinks too much, and Mary (dealing with her own melancholy memories of childhood spent with a psychotic parent) are not fleshed out much, and so the stakes here seem low. Ejiofor has little to work with, and Reinsve has little to offer beyond nervous bursts of breath once she goes searching for Clark in his lost world. The estimable Mark Duplass doesn't add much as a stoic researcher working for the company behind the grand experiment.
There are some obvious touchstones here that Parsons is building on (he was a teenager when he started the series and is 21 now). I thought of the equally opaque but more successful time-travel mind-benders by Shane Carruth, including "Primer" and "Upstream Color." I'm no horror aficionado, but one obvious reference is the focus on decor in "The Shining." And when Clark shows signs of losing his mind amid the catacombs, I thought of Col. Kurtz in "Apocalypse Now." I'm going to explore the web series more, even though much of the fleeting references will fly over my head, because as a visual exercise it looks a lot more interesting than this run-of-the-mill horror film that traps two good actors in a mundane script.
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