Yesterday, in a Facebook post by Yale film research scholar Oksana Chefranova, B. Ruby Rich, for many decades a respected film critic (Chicago Reader, old friend of Roger Ebert) and current editor of Film Quarterly, passed along a second-hand observation that calls Cristian Mungiu‘s Palme d’Or-winning Fjord “the MAGA film.”
This, trust me, is a bluntly inaccurate view, not to mention a combative one. Yes, Fjord does characterize a cabal of Norwegian woke lefties who persecute a Christian couple as villainous, but it doesn’t spray buckshot. There’s nothing rash or intemperate about it. It’s very carefully composed, restrained, measured and precise.
Rich said she’d lifted the “MAGA film” observation from “an esteemed U.S. curator.” So the progressive critical elite pushback that I predicted yesterday has definitely started.
