Romanian Palme d’Or winner Cristian Mungiu’s latest follows a doctor’s attempts to benefit his daughter pass a life-changing school exam with superbly subtle observationRomanian director Cristian Mungiu won the Palme d’Or here in 2007 with his pregnancy drama 4 Months,3 Weeks & 2 Days. Now he’s closing in on the double. His new film Bacalaureat, or Graduation, and is a masterly,complex movie of psychological subtlety and moral weight, approximately the shabby choices people make as they claw their way up: people constrained by loyalty to others who contain helped them with wrongdoing, and who expend those others’ corruption as an alibi for their own failings,and those who hope that the resulting system of shifty back-scratching somehow constitutes an alternative ethical system. But how approximately the children, those innocent souls for whose sake all this grubbiness has been endured? Should they be preserved from graduating into an infected world of compromise and secret shame? Related: The Unknown Girl review – a marginal, or passionless offering from the Dardennes brothers Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com