Butler's Cinema Scene

Adrian Titian,  Maria Dragus

“GRADUATION”  My rating: B

128 minutes | MPAA rating: R

America doesn’t have a filmmaker comparable to Romania’s Cristian Mungiu.  For more than a decade now Mungiu has served as his country’s cinematic conscience, exploring  in film after film Romania’s troubled past and infuriating present.

His biggest international hit has been  2007’s “4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days.” Set in the bad old days of the communist Ceausescu regime it follows a  college student as she tries to arrange an illegal abortion for her  roommate. That film offered a portrait of a society in which ordinary individuals routinely break the law simply to ensure their day-to-day survival.

Mungiu’s latest, “Graduation,” is set in the post-Ceausescu present. But cheating as a way of life remains entrenched in Romanian culture.

Romeo Aldea (Adrian Titieni) is a physician in a provincial Romanian city. He’s a fat, middled-aged man who prides himself on never taking bribes from desperate patients seeking preferential treatment — although he may not exactly be a moral giant, since he’s having an affair with a young single mother (Malina Manovici) who was once his patient.

His daughter, Eliza (Maria Drăguş) is about to graduate from high school. She’s been accepted by Cambridge University in England, much to the delight of Romeo and his phlegmatic wife Magda (Lia Bugnar). The couple fled Romania in the bad old days and returned only after the fall of Ceausescu, anticipating a brave new world of opportunity and promise.

Things didn’t work out that way.  The country may no longer be under the thumb of a half-mad strong man, but the stifling bureaucracy makes any kind of real progress problematic.  If Eliza is to have any future, Romeo believes, she must get out of Romania.

Just one problem…Eliza can go to England only if she  geat high scores on a battery of state-mandated examinations required of all new graduates (they’re kind of like the SATs on steroids).

On the eve of the test Eliza is seriously shaken after an assault by a would-be rapist. Fearing his traumatized daughter may not be at her best for the exams, Romeo looks for an edge.

A sympathetic  acquaintance on the police force suggests that Romeo talk to a vice-mayor in need of a kidney transplant. Romeo can pull strings to move the politician up on the transplant list in exchange for Eliza being allowed to cheat on the exam.

It’s the Romanian way of doing things.

This plot summary oversimplifies a complex portrait of modern Romanian society, not to mention the dynamics at work within Romeo’s own family. Just about everyone is working some sort of scam. And Eliza isn’t so sure she wants to go along with Romeo’s plan, which would have her marking her test papers in such a way that the crooked examiners can identify which are hers and treat them accordingly.

And while the Commie-era secret police are a thing of the past, a special unit has its hands full stomping out corruption, as Romeo will learn to his dismay.

Even on a physical level Mungiu paints a grim portrait of a stagnating culture.  Romeo’s family lives in a Ceausescu-era housing project that makes an American prison look inviting.

The film employs handheld camerawork and eschews a musical soundtrack, aiming for a sort of docu-realism.

“Graduation” is a grim tale of people who consider themselves virtuous yet who are always on the take. And yet through the desperation and manipulation and cynicism, there remains hope for a  better life, a more equitable existence.

Good luck with that.

| Robert W. Butler