Fjord — A Moral Avalanche at the End of the World
There are films that win the Palme d’Or, and then there are films like Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, movies that seem almost preordained to carry the weight of such a prize.
This is filmmaking of extraordinary moral ambition: riveting, nuanced, cathartic and profoundly unsettling, a slow-burning epic that burrows beneath the skin until its questions become our questions, its anxieties our anxieties, its moral dilemmas impossible to shake.
Set in a remote Norwegian fjord, Fjord follows a devout Romanian Norwegian couple, Mihai and Lisbet Gheorghiu, who relocate to a small community where their children form a friendship with the children of their neighbours. When adolescent Elia arrives at school bearing bruises, however, the community begins asking increasingly uncomfortable questions about the Gheorghius’ parenting, their religious beliefs and the boundaries between cultural difference and unacceptable behaviour.
And Mungiu — whose 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days remains one of the great Palme d’Or winners of the modern era — is having none of the easy answers.
Instead, Fjord becomes a gripping moral and social quandary, a film that refuses to tell us where sympathy should end and judgment begin. What constitutes good parenting? When does intervention become persecution? How much cultural difference can a liberal society accommodate before its commitment to tolerance begins colliding with its responsibility to protect children? And who gets to decide?
These are thorny questions, and Mungiu grapples with them with an almost unnerving patience.
Shot in icy widescreen compositions against the stark beauty — and terrifying avalanches — of Norwegian precipices, Fjord is a brilliant epic of landscape and conscience. The mountains are magnificent, but they are hardly comforting. They loom over the characters like indifferent gods while Mungiu meticulously piles one ethical complication upon another. The film sustains nail-biting tension across its 146-minute running time through meticulous pacing, confirming the Palme d’Or laureate as one of contemporary cinema’s sharpest moral observers.
The central performances by an outstanding Sebastian Stan and an absolutely riveting and revelatory Renate Reinsve are extraordinary precisely because nobody is reduced to a position in an argument.
Mungiu allows everyone their humanity, their contradictions, their fears and their blind spots. Variety called the result “riveting,” praising the ensemble’s careworn nuance, while The Telegraph described the film as a “slow-burn provocation” that confronts the contradictions of multiculturalism and public-sector institutions with unflinching seriousness.
What makes Fjord so powerful is that it never settles for the obvious culture-war narrative. It becomes a richly compelling and provocative culture war drama precisely because it understands that real culture wars are rarely about heroes and villains. They are about frightened people, competing obligations, incompatible understandings of responsibility and the terrifying possibility that everybody involved may believe they are doing the right thing.
There is something almost spiritual about the film, too.
Fjord is a triumphant work that tugs at the spiritual and soulful in all of us — regardless of nation, creed, faith, or the rejection of all three. Its tragic examination of the boundaries of acceptable behaviour, and of caregiving itself, unfolds as a meditation on what happens when private belief collides with public responsibility.
This is cinema that refuses complacency.
It watches. It waits. It tightens the screws.
And then, like an avalanche descending from those magnificent Norwegian heights, it leaves you wondering whether society can ever distinguish between protecting the vulnerable and protecting itself.
Fjord is not merely a Palme d’Or winner.
It is a moral earthquake.
Grade: A | A harrowing, provocative and controversial— yet always humane and moving— epic for the modern age, this Palme d’Or winner delivers in spades.
Fjord has one more screening at VIFF, on Wednesday, October 7th at 9 PM, at the Vancouver Playhouse.
Club Kid — Jordan Firstman Finds the Heart Beneath the Glitter
Jordan Firstman has spent years cultivating an online persona built on irony, provocation, bitchiness and the gleeful absurdity of internet culture. Then he went to Cannes with Club Kid and did something genuinely unexpected: he grew a heart.
Written, directed by and starring Firstman, Club Kid is a crowdpleasing queer family drama that somehow transforms the debris of New York’s hedonistic gay nightlife — drugs, parties, bad decisions, emotional wreckage and spectacularly questionable behaviour — into something earnest, heartwarming and surprisingly moving.
Firstman plays Peter, a washed-up New York party promoter whose carefully constructed life of perpetual nightlife is detonated by the arrival of a 10-year-old son he never knew he had. What follows is Peter’s fumbling, frequently hilarious and occasionally heartbreaking journey toward fatherhood.
And somehow, it works.
Indeed, it works gloriously.
Club Kid is an acidic, spikily funny portrait of the city’s hedonistic gay scene, but beneath all the bitchy humour is a celebration of empathy, community and the unconditional love between a father and his son. Firstman finally shirks the ironic pose he has taken online for years to emerge as a sincere storyteller with heart as much as humour. IndieWire specifically praised this transformation, describing a filmmaker who moves beyond his online persona to reveal himself as a storyteller of genuine sincerity.
The movie promises — and absolutely delivers — scenes of copious drug taking, gross-out comedy, chaotic nightlife and the sort of behaviour that makes responsible parenting manuals spontaneously combust. Yet Firstman understands the most important trick in the cinematic playbook: make us laugh first, then make us care.
By the third act, the emotional payoff is both well-earned and devastating.
Firstman’s performance is particularly bracing. There are moments when the armour falls away and Peter becomes vulnerable, frightened and utterly human. That vulnerability gives Club Kid its emotional force. AwardsWatch praised Firstman’s ability to strip away his persona for moments of “bracing vulnerability,” while The Film Stage singled out the film’s third-act payoff as devastating.
The supporting cast adds further pleasure. Cara Delevingne, used sparingly and effectively, plays Peter’s cutting business partner, while The Night Manager’s Diego Calva is wonderfully sympathetic as an extremely obliging social worker. Together with Firstman’s wonderfully chaotic ensemble, they make Club Kid nothing if not easy to like.
And then there is the film’s unabashed sweetness.
That may be Club Kid’s greatest surprise.
This is a bracing, vulnerable, redemptive movie alive with warmth. It is a celebration of unconventional lifestyles without pretending that unconventional lives are uncomplicated. It offers a vivacious look at the realities of parenting — especially parenting when you have absolutely no idea what you are doing — while insisting that love can arrive late, messily and from the least expected direction.
There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about its emotional generosity.
Club Kid wants us to believe people can change.
More importantly, it wants us to believe that they can love one another while they are changing.
And by the time Peter finally begins to understand what being a father might mean, Firstman has pulled off something considerably more difficult than a joke.
He has made us feel.
VanRamblings’ Grade: A– | A moving, tender drama set in New York’s trans & queer community, unprecedented in scope. A film that surprises while warming the heart.
Club Kid has one more screening at VIFF, this upcoming Monday, October 5th, 9:15 PM, at The Park Theatre on Cambie Street.