An organ transplant in exchange for a final exam score?
It’s a helluva quid pro quo — and decision — facing Dr. Romeo Aldea’s family in “Graduation,” an intense drama of compromise and corruption in contemporary Romania.
The doctor resides in a Communist-era concrete housing block in the backwater Transylvanian city of Cluj, where he and his wife, Magda, have raised their beloved daughter, Eliza, with one burning goal: that, at 18, she’ll escape to “civilization” abroad. She’s already done the tough part — winning a scholarship to study at Cambridge. She has only to pass her final exams in the upper tier. No problem for such a good student.
But the day before those tests begin, Eliza suffers a violent assault that shakes her to the core and seriously jeopardizes her father’s best-laid plans. The potential solution contradicts the high principles he has always taught her and practiced himself.
“Some chances shouldn't be wasted,” he says, reminding Eliza that, having fled communist Romania, he and her mother decided to move back after the brutal Ceausescu regime fell. “We thought things would change, we thought we'd move mountains. We didn't move anything.”
Starring: Adrian Titieni, Maria-Victoria Dragus, Lia Bugnar.
Rating: R for mature thematic material and language.
Can it hurt, now, to pull a few strings?
The chief police inspector investigating Eliza’s assault is the doctor’s old pal. He, in turn, is an old pal of the town’s ailing vice mayor, who once did a big favor for the head of Eliza’s examination board. The vice mayor desperately needs a liver transplant but is way down on the waiting list.
Can’t some mutually beneficial strings be pulled?
The attack on Eliza constitutes an emergency, and exceptions to the rule are allowed, Romeo rationalizes. “It’s just a precaution to get you where you need to go.”
Other troubling matters: How do his high moral standards jibe with a long affair and illegitimate son? What about righteous wife Magda — now depressed and defeated — who never lowered her standards but paid for it daily in a dull, lousy job?
And what about Eliza’s suspicious “motorcycle teacher” boyfriend?
Disillusion and regret permeate Romeo’s immersion in the system he despises, as writer-director Cristian Mungiu explores all the ambiguities. “Graduation” earned him a best director prize at Cannes for this provocative but inconclusive glimpse into a society of honorable folks who say, “I don’t do such things!” — even as they do them.
Adrian Titieni’s impeccable performance as Romeo — so feckless, uncharismatic and ironically named! — carries it along, with the help of Maria-Victoria Dragus and Lia Bugnar as his daughter and wife, even though, at two hours-plus, it’s overlong and its parental melodrama (“How did we become such enemies?”) is belabored.
This country — like its strangely beautiful Romance language — is caught betwixt and between the Slavs, still unable to rid itself of old survival tricks learned during decades of dictatorship. It’s a sort of exoplanet QX9003 — some habitable world we can detect but don’t remotely understand.
My great East European history professor (later Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser) Zbigniew Brzezinski began his memorable lecture on the place with words I recall verbatim 50 years later: “Romania is like a man who goes into a revolving door behind you and comes out in front.”
Too clever for its own good — but not without hope for the future.
(In Romanian with English subtitles. At the Harris Theater, Downtown.)
Post-Gazette film critic emeritus Barry Paris: parispg48@aol.com.
First Published: May 2, 2017, 3:03 a.m.
