In the immediate wake of Cristian Mngiu‘s Fjord winning the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or on 5.23.26, woke-mob pushback was voiced by respected film critic B. Ruby Rich in a 5.24 Facebook post.
Rich passed along a second-hand observation (originally shared, she said, by “an esteemed U.S. curator”) that called Fjord “the MAGA film.”
Three days later came another shot across the Fjord bow, this time from identity-compelled New Yorker critic Justin Chang. In a 5.27 piece titled “All the Films in Competition at Cannes 2026, Ranked from Best to Worst“, Chang dismissively ranked Fjord, the festival’s only home-run knockout in my view, as the 11th best film he saw in Cannes, while snooting the following sentence: “More than a few wondered if Mungiu, whose Romanian-set films have forcefully criticized reliogious fundamentalism, had suddenly moved rightward as his camera drifted west [to Norway].”
HE interjection: “More than a few” alludes to the same people B. Ruby Rich and her “esteemed U.S. curator” had been chatting with in Cannes. The notion that Mingiu’s social-political perceptions may have “suddenly moved eightward” is an oblique, carefully phrased, typically Chang-ian way of saying Mingiu’s thinking (on this film at least) may have gone MAGA.
Two excerpts from Scott Roxborough’s THR interview with Mungiu, posted on 5.22.26:
