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.
