Sorry for re-posting, but Criterion’s Bluray of Cristian Mungiu‘s Graduation pops tomorrow (5.22). Maybe there are some who missed my original review. Even if the jacket art bores or puzzles you, this 2017 film (which premiered in Cannes in May 2016) is really quite essential.

It’s a fascinating slow-build drama about ethics, parental love, compromised values and what most of us would call soft corruption. It basically says that ethical lapses are deceptive in that they don’t seem too problematic at first, but they have a way of metastasizing into something worse, and that once this happens the smell starts to spread and the perpetrators start to feel sick in their souls.

I don’t necessarily look at things this way, and yet Mungiu’s film puts the hook in. I felt the full weight of his viewpoint, which tends to happen, of course, when you’re watching a film by a masterful director, which Mungui (Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days, Beyond The Hills) certainly is.

And yet I tend to shy away from judging people too harshly when they bend the rules once or twice. Not as a constant approach but once in a blue moon. I’m not calling myself a moral relativist, but I do believe there’s a dividing line between hard corruption and the softer, looser variety, and I know that many of us have crossed paths with the latter. Let he who’s without sin cast the first stone.

Politicians or dirty cops who accept payoffs from ne’er-do-wells in exchange for favoritism or looking the other way — that’s hard, blatant corruption. Soft corruption is a milder manifestation — a form of ethical side-stepping that decent people go along with from time to time in order to (a) prevent something worse from happening or (b) to help a friend or family member who’s in a tough spot and needs a little friendly finagling to make the problem go away or become less acute.

The soft corruption in Graduation, which is set in a mid-sized town in Transylvania (the region in Romania where Dracula came from), has to do with a father (Adrian Titieni) who’s trying to help his daughter (Maria Dragus), an A-student who hopes to study psychology in London, with her final exam. Unfortunately she’s obliged to take the exam right after suffering an attack by a would-be rapist. The assault momentarily scrambles her brain, and she winds up not doing as well as she might have otherwise.

A Criterion Bluray of Cristian Munguiu‘s Graduation (Romanian: Bacalaureat) will street on 5.22.18. I don’t know why it’s been given a 2K mastering instead of 4K, but it has. Essential viewing for anyone with half a brain. Easily one of the best films of ’16 or ’17, whichever you prefer. It earned a pittance at the U.S. box-office, largely due to the fact that a majority of American moviegoers are morons.

“Cristian Mungiu‘s Graduation is a fascinating slow-build drama about ethics, parental love, compromised values and what most of us would call soft corruption. It basically says that ethical lapses are deceptive in that they don’t seem too problematic at first, but they have a way of metastasizing into something worse, and that once this happens the smell starts to spread and the perpetrators start to feel sick in their souls.

“I don’t necessarily look at things this way, and yet Mungiu’s film puts the hook in. I felt the full weight of his viewpoint, which tends to happen, of course, when you’re watching a film by a masterful director, which Mungui (Four Months, Three Weeks, Two days, Beyond The Hills) certainly is.

“And yet I tend to shy away from judging people too harshly when they bend the rules once or twice. Not as a constant approach but once in a blue moon. I’m not calling myself a moral relativist, but I do believe there’s a dividing line between hard corruption and the softer, looser variety, and I know that many of us have crossed paths with the latter. Let he who’s without sin cast the first stone.

“Politicians or dirty cops who accept payoffs from ne’er-do-wells in exchange for favoritism or looking the other way — that’s hard, blatant corruption. Soft corruption is a milder manifestation — a form of ethical side-stepping that decent people go along with from time to time in order to (a) prevent something worse from happening or (b) to help a friend or family member who’s in a tough spot and needs a little friendly finagling to make the problem go away or become less acute.

HE’s own Cristian Mungiu — Palme d’Or winner for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and co-recipient of last year’s Best Director prize for Graduation — will serve as the honcho for the 2017 Cannes Film Festival’s student and short film juries. What does this have to do with the price of rice in Pomona? Nothing, but at least it’s another opportunity to remind engaged, upmarket viewers to catch Graduation when it opens on April 7th…please.

It’s also an opportunity to re-post my 5.19.16 Graduation review, titled “Graduation Is A Grabber, But Cutting A Slight Ethical Corner In a Tight Spot Isn’t Necessarily An Evil Thing”:

Cristian Mungiu at Bouchon during a 2012 Beyond The Hills promotional party.

Graduation is a fascinating slow-build drama about ethics, parental love, compromised values and what most of us would call soft corruption. It basically says that ethical lapses are deceptive in that they don’t seem too problematic at first, but they have a way of metastasizing into something worse, and that once this happens the smell starts to spread and the perpetrators feel increasingly sick in their souls.

I don’t necessarily look at things this way, and yet Mungiu’s film puts the hook in. I felt the full weight of his viewpoint, which tends to happen, of course, when you’re watching a film by a masterful director, which Mungui (Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days, Beyond The Hills) most certainly is.

And yet I tend to shy away from judging people too harshly when they bend the rules once or twice. Not as a constant approach but once in a blue moon. I’m not calling myself a moral relativist, but I do believe there’s a dividing line between hard corruption and the softer, looser variety, and I know that many of us have crossed paths with the latter. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

I saw Cristian Mungiu‘s Graduation (Sundance Selects, 4.8) in Cannes about ten months ago. The great Mungiu, who shared the Best Director prize last May with Personal Shopper‘s Olivier Assayas, won’t be doing face-time interviews in Los Angeles. (Maybe phoners, I’m told.) My memory’s gone a little stale so I’m catching it again tonight at 7:30 pm.

But I’d see it again under any circumstance. All Mungiu films gain with repeated viewings. I’ve seen Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days four or five times, and I could watch it again right now.

“Conversation With A Master“, posted from Cannes on 5.20.16:

I spoke this afternoon with renowned Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, whose ethical drama Graduation (a.k.a. Bacalaureat) was universally praised after screening yesterday morning. I called it “a fascinating slow-build drama about ethics, parental love, compromised values and what most of us would call soft corruption.”

We discussed the film’s view of things, which is basically how capitulating to soft corruption can seem at first like nothing but that it can slightly weaken your fibre and make you susceptible to harder forms down the road.

Accepting and living with a certain amount of soft corruption is par for the course in my realm. It greases the wheels in this and that way. If you’re at all involved with the hurly burly, you know the truth of this. “This world is so full of crap you’re going to get into it whether you’re careful or not” — a quote from what film?

I mentioned a story I passed along yesterday about my father having persuaded a Rutgers professor to give him a passing grade despite having failed a final exam, which was definitely a soft ethical lapse. Mungiu smiled and said, “Life is complicated.”

I spoke this afternoon with renowned Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, whose ethical drama Graduation (a.k.a. Bacalaureat) was universally praised after screening yesterday morning. I called it “a fascinating slow-build drama about ethics, parental love, compromised values and what most of us would call soft corruption.”

I would be surprised if Graduation isn’t awarded by the Cannes jury in some major category, but expectations are often thwarted along these lines.

Graduation director Cristian Mungiu — Friday, 5.20, 2:30 pm.

We discussed the film’s view of things, which is basically how capitulating to soft corruption can seem at first like nothing but that it can slightly weaken your fibre and make you susceptible to harder forms down the road. I mentioned a story I passed along yesterday about my father having persuaded a Rutgers professor to give him a passing grade despite having failed a final exam, which was definitely a soft ethical lapse. Mungiu smiled and said “life is complicated.”

We talked about his two kids, ages 6 and 11, and the mostly older films he’s been showing them. Mungiu feels it’s better to expose them to classic silents at an early age before they become accustomed to today’s noisier, faster fare and lose the patience to absorb the artistry of Buster Keaton.

Cristian Mungiu‘s Graduation is a fascinating slow-build drama about ethics, parental love, compromised values and what most of us would call soft corruption. It basically says that ethical lapses are deceptive in that they don’t seem too problematic at first, but they have a way of metastasizing into something worse, and that once this happens the smell starts to spread and the perpetrators start to feel sick in their souls.

I don’t necessarily look at things this way, and yet Mungiu’s film puts the hook in. I felt the full weight of his viewpoint, which tends to happen, of course, when you’re watching a film by a masterful director, which Mungui (Four Months, Three Weeks, Two days, Beyond The Hills) certainly is.

And yet I tend to shy away from judging people too harshly when they bend the rules once or twice. Not as a constant approach but once in a blue moon. I’m not calling myself a moral relativist, but I do believe there’s a dividing line between hard corruption and the softer, looser variety, and I know that many of us have crossed paths with the latter. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

Politicians or dirty cops who accept payoffs from ne’er-do-wells in exchange for favoritism or looking the other way — that’s hard, blatant corruption. Soft corruption is a milder manifestation — a form of ethical side-stepping that decent people go along with from time to time in order to (a) prevent something worse from happening or (b) to help a friend or family member who’s in a tough spot and needs a little friendly finagling to make the problem go away or become less acute.

The soft corruption in Graduation, which is set in a mid-sized town in Transylvania (the region in Romania where Dracula came from), has to do with a father (Adrian Titieni) who’s trying to help his daughter (Maria Dragus), an A-student who hopes to study psychology in London, with her final exams after she’s suffered an attacked by a would-be rapist. The trauma of the assault has momentarily scrambled her brain, and she winds up not doing as well on her finals as she might have otherwise.

So her father asks administrators to let her to take the exam again, and to ensure that she does a little better this time he arranges for her final grade to be tweaked upwards. But the daughter will have to cooperate, the father is told, by crossing out three words at the bottom of the first page of the exam — a signal to the tweaker.

You can tell Cristian Mungiu‘s Graduation (i.e., Bacalaureat) is made of strong, jolting stuff. To his everlasting and glorious credit, Mungiu is not Zack Snyder. When disturbing or traumatic things happen in his films (such as in Beyond The Hills) he never slams them into your face. He captures incidents from a distance, in the corners of frames, sudden and unforeseen. Consider what seems to be happening in this trailer at 1:10 and 1:34. Pic has been described as “a powerful and universal study about the imprecision of parenthood, the relativity of truth and the ambiguity of compromise, revealed by a father-daughter relationship.” The Romanian drama will soon play in competition in Cannes.

Cristian Mungiu‘s Beyond The Hills has been playing in three theatres since Friday. Presumably a few HE readers have seen it by now; it would be nice to run some reactions. It’s got a very respectable 83% Rotten Tomato rating. I’ve been praising it up and down since catching it 10 months ago in Cannes. Time‘s Mary Pols said it “may be the best movie no one will want to see in 2013” I get that. But HE readers are different.

Okay, it’s a little long and perhaps too slowly paced, but that’s partly…perhaps entirely the point. Mungiu knows exactly what he’s doing, and I have to bluntly explain something. This movie is on you, man. You have to man up and sink in and study those nuns and that bearded, none-too-bright priest and those static situations and the stuff going in the background. Sometimes that’s the thing and not what’s happening in the foreground. Mungiu’s every-so-often decision not to have violent action occur front and center isn’t just brilliant — it’s historic.

You have to feel the chill wind and smell the goat’s milk and the burning wood and surrender to the grayness and the occasional snowfalls. And you definitely have to savor that final shot inside the police van. Either you get Romanian cinema or you don’t. BTH is a little bit dull at times, okay, but a major art film.

How many world-class male directors (domestic or foreign) are known for appearing to understand and get under the skins of strong female characters, and have shown more than once how masterful they are at telling women-friendly dramas? I’ve noted before that this description fits Beyond The Hills director Cristian Mungiu…but who else? With this grim but curiously compelling drama of obsession and exorcism opening on March 8th, it’s worth re-posting a four-month-old riff:

Beyond The Hills director Cristian Mungiu at Bouchon — Sunday, 11.4, 10:07 pm.

“A thought hit me during Sunday night’s dinner at Bouchon for Beyond The Hills and Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days director Cristian Mungiu that he could be in the Terrence Malick business if he wanted it. His rep as a woman-friendly, deep-focus, introspective helmer is such he could make indie-fashioned pics in this country with any in-demand actress in the business.

“They’d all work with him at the drop of a hat, Meryl Streep on down, because he’s a celebrated, Bresson-like perfectionist.

“I asked Mungiu about this and he said that he’s heard from more than a few American actresses, all saying they’d love to work with him. But he really is a Bressonian in that he prefers (or has so far preferred) to work with non-actresses. He also says there’s something about the aura of an established or famous actress that might impose itself upon his process…maybe. But he’s open to the right thing if it seems right, he said, so no doors are firmly closed.

“He said he recently got an email from director William Friedkin about wanting to meet, partly because they’ve both shot films about exorcisms. But he’s leaving Los Angeles tomorrow with no plans to return anytime soon.”

Mungiu, dp Svetlana Cvetko — Sunday, 11.4, 10:10 pm.

And this from five and half years ago:

“Calm, confident and obviously whip-smart, Mungiu speaks with a vast English vocabulary and a very faint accent. He’s a believer in pared-down, less-is-more realism, and he knows how to explain his cinematic aesthetic in a very clean and concise way. He listens carefully and knows his stuff. I could talk to Mungiu for days. The same ‘instant comfort’ thing happens whenever I meet a good director from any culture.”

I haven’t seen many March films, but the good ones seem few and far between. By my yardstick the two best will emerge at the end of the month. Wayne Blair‘s The Sapphires (Weinstein Co., 3.22) is a partial knockout, but entirely worth seeing for Chris Dowd‘s landmark performance as a road manager who’s also a major Motown fanatic. If you’re a fan of The Shining, Rodney Ascher‘s Room 237 (IFC Films, 3.29) is the shit, a hoot, a trip — the smartest and sharpest film of the month. And no, the trailers haven’t done it justice

3.1: Ixnay on Stoker and the reviews for Jack the Giant Slayer haven’t been good. I still haven’t seen The Sweeney. If anything, Kim Nguyen‘s War Witch is probably the one to see. Honestly? I’ve only watched half of the screener. That’s not a criticism — just an admission of laziness.

3.8: The only interesting thing I’ve noticed so far about Sam Raimi‘s Oz: The Great and Powerful (which I’ve only seen traielrs for) is the black-and-white beginning. Cristian Mungiu‘s Beyond the Hills is deliberately paced, austere, and in my book first-rate. David Riker‘s The Girl has a commendable Abbie Cornish performance but is otherwise a bit of a mixed bag. I still haven’t seen Michel Gondry‘s The We And The I. I’m sorry but I felt underwhelmed by Peter Webber‘s Emperor.

3.15: I caught Sally Potter‘s Ginger and Rosa at last September’s Telluride Film Festival — distinctive, intriguing, less than fully satisfying. I won’t see Harmony Korine‘s Spring Breakers until Thursday. < strong>3.22: I haven’t seen Paul Weitz‘s comedic Admission but it’s apparently quite slight.

It’s fine to riff about the Academy’s foreign language committee shortlist but the race is over. The 2012 Foreign Language Feature Oscar is going to go to Michael Haneke‘s Amour. Locked, forget about it. (Right?) The only thing that pops out is the wholly unwarranted exclusion of Christian Petzold‘s Barbara, which I saw and greatly admired at Telluride.

Leos Carax‘s Holy Motors wasn’t France’s official submission so that was that, but this is unquestionably one of the great 2012 films, foreign-made or not. Jacques Audiard‘s Rust and Bone suffered the same fate.

The Barbara snub isn’t on the level of the committee’s blow-off of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and/or Olivier Assayas‘s Carlos (can’t recall if it was shortlisted or not but it wasn’t nominated) but it’s a glaring omission all the same. It’s at least encouraging that the latest film from 4,3,2 helmer Cristian Mungiu, the somber and austere and entirely satisfying Beyond The Hills, did make the shortlist.

Nine films out of 71 entries were chosen. I’ve listed them in order of my own personal preference:

1. No (Chile), d: Pablo Larraín (if Amour weren’t in the running, No would be the frontrunner).
2. Amour (Austria) — d: Michael Haneke (guaranteed winner).
3. Beyond the Hills (Romania), d: Cristian Mungiu (brilliant — Mungiu is a Bresson-level auteur)
4. A Royal Affair (Denmark), d: Nikolaj Arcel (a strong, well-written, well produced historical drama — intelligent and compelling).
5. Sister (Switzerland), d: Ursula Meier (saw it in Cannes — a skillful, penetrating, honestly assembled character piece).
6. The Intouchables (France), d: Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano (will almost certainly be one of the final five nominees).
7. The Deep (Iceland), d: Baltasar Kormakur.
8. Kon-Tiki (Norway), d: Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg (watched the screener, was underwhelmed)
9. War Witch (Canada),d: Kim Nguyen (haven’t watched screener).

The shortlist will be pruned to five nominees during a marathon session lasting from Friday, 1.4 through Sunday, 1.6, during which the Academy’s foreign-branch voters will watch three of the shortlisted films each day, etc. Oscar nominations will be announced on Thursday, 1.10, in the early ayem.

A thought hit me during Sunday night’s dinner at Bouchon for Beyond The Hills and Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days director Cristian Mungiu that he could be in the Terrence Malick business if he wanted it. His rep as a woman-friendly, deep-focus, introspective helmer is such he could make indie-fashioned pics in this country with any in-demand actress in the business. They’d all work with him at the drop of a hat, Meryl Streep on down, because he’s a celebrated, Bresson-like perfectionist.

Beyond The Hills director Cristian Mungiu at Bouchon — Sunday, 11.4, 10:07 pm.

I asked Mungiu about this and he said that he’s heard from more than a few American actresses, all saying they’d love to work with him. But he really is a Bressonian in that he prefers (or has so far preferred) to work with non-actresses. He also says there’s something about the aura of an established or famous actress that might impose itself upon his process…maybe. But he’s open to the right thing if it seems right, he said, so no doors are firmly closed. He said he recently got an email from director William Friedkin about wanting to meet, partly because they’ve both shot films about exorcisms. But he’s leaving Los Angeles tomorrow with no plans to return anytime soon.

Mungiu, dp Svetlana Cvetko — Sunday, 11.4, 10:10 pm.