Not trying to join the Stereogum Anniversary Culture, but I happened to watch this on the tenth anniversary of its premiere. This is bound to happen at least once during Cannes Week. Rounding out my viewing of Mungiu’s major features right before his brand-new one debuted, this one’s a prime example of a movie good enough to transcend its dreary subject matter (insular religious cultures; see also Silent Light).

Much of the appeal is in the character of Alina (Cristina Flutur of Backdraft 2, what?). She and Voichita (Cosmina Stratan of the Border guy’s surrogate pregnancy movie) were orphanage sisters, now separated, and Alina returns to visit then refuses to leave. She’s extremely needy, fearing abandonment, but also acts impossible so she can’t stay anywhere. Both the hospital and Voichita’s quiet monastery say they’re overcrowded during renovations, and anyway, Alina isn’t a believer. But she’s devoted to her friend, so the nuns read Alina a list of all 464 sins to see which she has committed, then when she’s violent they tie her down to drive out her evil spirits, but she’s also convulsive, and they leave her tied too long, and she dies. Seems like an openhearted, respectful take on a tragic story, made in the good ol’ master-shot long-take foreign-arthouse style.

We closely follow Romeo (Adrian Titieni, one of Mr. Lazarescu‘s many doctors), sort of a sad Romanian Nick Frost, during the week of his daughter’s final exams. At first he’s a regular guy whose family has a string of bad luck, then things open up and we see that he’s cheating on his wife, that all the professional and government services are greased by favors and bribes, and that, in trying to help his daughter, he ends up dragging her into the small-town societal corruption that he was trying to save her from. We don’t know for sure if she’ll end up going off to Cambridge, or stay in town with her boyfriend and fall into the same traps as her parents, but I suspect the latter. At least the problems on display here aren’t as life-crushingly bad as in Leviathan.

Daughter Magda is Maria-Victoria Dragus (creepy bird-murdering kid of The White Ribbon). Mungiu tied with Assayas for best director at last year’s Cannes. I finally got to see it on opening day of this year’s Cannes (and also during graduation week).

V. Morton, who also has a nice bit on the film’s “egalitarian framing”:

Even as the film’s central narrative event happens (the assault on Romeo’s daughter on the eve of her baccalaureate exams), we see Romeo as an adulterer (later, we learn, with his wife’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” semi-connivance). We very promptly learn after the assault, even before the narrative implications have really been set up, that he and “Vlad Ivanov” had bribed their way out of the military draft and thus “owe” someone re a liver transplant. Romeo is a doctor. Graduation is not the story of a good man corrupted but a corrupt man trying to do “good” (when it serves him and his) because society runs on corruption.