The Degrees of Separation: A review of Fjord
by Aksharaa Agarwal
It’s a haphazard routine at the sinking of a ship, set to the sound of Amazing Grace. Those are the recognizable notes that, over the image of the boat at sea, open this driven drama. Though many characters immediately crowd the frame, as various members of the family at its heart assimilate themselves to new, respective environs, what we’ll come to find is that it only takes two. Two for the engirding of the young, for their enlisting into inherited ways of life; for the conversion of one to the other in imperfect manner, producing mistranslations; for the inching of a tendril away from the stem, curling; for an altercation involving contact-impact; for the parting of ways or the returning of one to other, though altered irrevocably.
A fjord is a body of water flanked on either side by the rising of steep cliffs. Never matter how turbulent the tide. Not only is it an image perfectly evocative of what is to transpire, but it also is the picturesque backdrop against which they bizarrely do. Cold, enveloping blue, into which the Gheorghius are quickly subsumed, all seven of them, though their new friends and neighbours never quite get their last names right. Enmeshment is essential, and for a family of their size, their overwhelming overlaps produce an enveloping effect in which the community around is steadily wrapped up. Even when they’re being avoided, they’re hard to ignore, piano music bleeding faintly out the door. Standing out soon steeps into sticking up like a sore thumb. Ruffled feathers rarely rest unpreened, and a perfect opportunity for inspection appears upon the presentation of a wound.
From this point on a swift series of unprecedented outcomes sweeps the rug out from underneath the family’s feet and it is wholly involving. Homecoming being much harder than homemaking, it seems, as Mr. and Mrs. scramble to retrace how it came to be that they have scattered like billiard balls struck for the break shot within the span of a day. Indeed, it will be nearly a year before they’re all under the same roof again, and the terms of this parting provoke the two to confront the parts of the world their lifestyle affords them to deny their burgeoning progeny. Layering complex contemporary issues of political differences and attitudes at large over localised interpersonal conflicts activates the heretofore largely unappealing reproductions of what must, in some small re-assembled part, be actual people.
Festival and arthouse audiences can expect for their experience to be challenging, engaging with it de facto as a ‘their side of things’ narrative. It’s a simple premise of being completely welcome to enter where you wouldn’t really be inclined to go in. However, this isn’t Being John Malkovich. It is not interesting in itself that stars with the respective reputations of Sebastian Stan and Renate Riensve take on the central portrayals, though it does lend a constant tension palpable to familiar audiences as they are estranged from it over the course of two and a half hours. (Also, it is very enjoyable to watch them take this on, head on as they do.) No, what Christian Mungiu has orchestrated is a pressing-past, in which it doesn’t matter who exactly, where exactly, or how exactly, as much as it matters what- What exactly is it that is being executed here? Does it match what it is said to be? What is happening here that is going unsaid, what is the consequence of withholding? One is not incensed as much as one is invested, but nobody can go unmoved; watching a mother lose her milk without her newborn around can only be harrowing.
‘I was trying all the time to have a very balanced view of things,’ Mungiu has said about the writing process. The trick at the core of Fjord is the slow recognition that the reflections on the surface are not ours. The balance worked into the narrative makes stark it’s absence where striking it is crucial. We may have begun from a common point but have diverged, nothing else explains that we have now somehow switched sides.
There is something of a sense of injustice to the entire judicial affair, not blatant but undeniable, nevertheless. The exact kind that makes an unaccounted for gap apparent. It proceeds unimpeded, thieving the preciousness of time and all its possibilities. It’s the absurdity of having to bargain with acquaintances in formal address as they rip your life apart at a structurally critical seam. We can do nothing about it, but watch, and Mungiu is trying to get us to notice that. He’s counting on our righteousness to allow us to admit to the faults at hand. We are now witnesses. Tug at a collar, stir, shuffle uncomfortably in your seat. You know something. Everyone here knows- and it is making no difference.
One cannot quite pinpoint what is going wrong here, because in principle, it seems right as can be. Is it misadventure or tragedy? It’s a matter of disproportion. It’s degrees of separation. The scope is vast and this vastness is talking. Sometimes, there is no clarity; just consequence. However, in brief interstices, there is also comedy; in the spirit of salvation, this too shall pass, even if it’s because we go running back the way we came.