Critics reviews

Strange reveries where characters mysteriously cry to themselves in the dark do not, at first glance, seem to be part of its aesthetic or narrative repertoire. But in these quiet moments—instances that stand in contrast to the central discourse of the film—Graduation takes on another dimension, and the director’s formal choices reveal their power. 

These counterpointed expectations are never reconciled — even Eliza has doubts about studying abroad, as she grows more and more attached to her biker boyfriend. The multidirectional pull of these various desires is an effective parallel for the context Mungiu seeks to critique — freedom from institutionalised corruption can only come about through collective effort, but orchestration is near impossible when everyone wants freedom for different reasons.

There's almost no shot in Graduation that isn't a single or dual portrait. The camera never roams an interior or a landscape. Nor does it ever retreat into the far distance, or into gruesome close-ups. Everything is shot from the neat distance of a conversation—or an audience. Maybe every film director has to find ways of refusing the forms of theater. That's one lesson of Graduation.

It's a film of generic social realism, of an international style of no style, that proclaims a fidelity to reality, to the external details of characters' lives—at least, to those few that fall through the narrow sieve of the filmmaker's intentions and designs... It is cinema-by-the-yard, the kind of pseudo-sophisticated self-congratulation that could serve as virtual art-house fan service, the marker of a social group's identifying attitudes rather than a creation of independent substance.

A fascinating and fastidiously complex study of one man's moral choices at a crucial juncture in his life, Cristian Mungiu's "Graduation" is a thoroughgoing masterpiece which offers proof that Romania's cinematic upsurge remains the most vital and important national film movement of the current century.

The film ultimately registers as a scrupulous study of family life in collision with the national pastime of influence peddling. But it's a testament to the clarity and intensity of Mungiu's vision that one has grown to expect a little more from him.

It's tempting to call Cristian Mungiu's Graduation a nightmare vision of a small Transylvanian town, but what's truly haunting about the movie is how casually almost everyone in it accedes to corruption and pettiness.

A well-crafted drama that pays attention to every detail. Yet Mungiu has not attempted to exhaust his audience with a totally predictable narrative. Instead, he brings elements of mystery and surprise into the story to make us question the situation. This is the conception that the director has regarding the relationship between cinema and reality.

In a typically bold directorial decision, Cristian Mungiu, who in 2008 guided audiences through a Ceaușescu-era maze of underhand payoffs with 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, allows the most crucial phone call of the film to play out in a different room while the camera follows Romeo's lover elsewhere... Superbly acted, and photographed and edited with forensic precision, this is Romanian cinema at its best.

As in 4 Months, Graduation ends on an unexpectedly upbeat note: although narrative threads are left tantalisingly dangling (to underscore the abiding theme that poor decisions can have lifelong repercussions), there's a legitimate reason for Eliza to sport a hesitant but genuine smile in the final shot – a rarity in this grim but riveting film.

...Also taking place in Romania, this time told from the point of view of the father (the teenage daughter, excellently played by Maria Dragus, remains a cipher) is Baccalauréat that plunges into some troubled waters of ethical ambiguity... It's a sombre film... but it bears in common the fact that, in father-daughter relationships there is no pre-written script. Everyone wears a mask, everyone fumbles, love is never enough, it's too much, or not enough, or misguided.

...This is not to say that Mungiu's films are rote exercises in blunt statement-making, but at the same time one wouldn't accuse them of subtlety. Though we never lose sight of Romeo, Eliza, Sandra, and Magda as individuals, Graduation continually broadens out through a series of institutional representatives (school, police, law, government) such that by the end, the entirety of society seems implicated in fixing the exam for Eliza.