Fjord review - Cristian Mungiu at sea with strange child abuse drama starring Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan

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Cannes film festival: The Palme laureate here makes a misstep with an odd, disquieting film that leaves too many issues unresolved Romanian director and Palme laureate Cristian Mungiu – the winner here in 2007 with his stunning 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days – comes to Cannes with an anticlimactic, underpowered movie which it seems to me could be part of an odd phenomenon at this year’s festival, detectable also in films here by Kantemir Balagov and Ryusuke Hamaguchi: auteurs making coproduction movies outside their home turf and mother tongue with big foreign stars, perhaps as a result of creative conversations at international film festivals with admirers from all over the world – and losing focus. Fjord is an odd film, bearing Mungiu’s signature, certainly, with enigmatic long shots and avoidance of closeups, and one very distinctive crowding of faces in a dinner-scene tableau. But the ostensible pain and trauma of its story is conveyed without the rewarding complexity that we have...
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American Graffiti at 50: a classic hangout comedy with a surprising melancholy

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George Lucas’s 60s-set tale of California teens offers some freewheeling fun but also a lingering sadness

Ninety-nine times out of 100, the postscripts that get tucked in before the closing credits, telling us where the characters’ lives have gone from there, are totally unnecessary, especially in a fictional story where their fates are better left to the viewer’s imagination. But in George Lucas’s American Graffiti, which turns 50 this week, they are the most important part of the film, not least because two of the four characters don’t have much longer to live. We can feel that darkness lingering around the edges of Lucas’ dusk-till-dawn nostalgia piece about the last night of summer vacation in 1962 Modesto, California, even while its teenagers are getting into mostly light-hearted forms of trouble. This night has to end, and when the sun comes up, their entire world turns back into a pumpkin.

From the opening shot of Mel’s Drive-In, set to Bill Haley and His Comets’ Rock Around the Clock, American Graffiti seems to unfold inside a snow globe, an idealized past with invisible borders that separate it not only from the outside world, but from the future itself. It’s one of those films, like its spiritual successor Dazed and Confused, that has the quality of a hangout comedy, loose-limbed and goofily episodic, but laced with an air of melancholy that’s so subtle you miss it entirely. (That’s why the postscript is such a slap in the face.) It aches for a scene that had passed just a decade earlier, before the tumult of the Vietnam war and counter-culture, but must have seemed, even then, like ancient history.

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