From the opening shot of its protagonist's drab neighborhood, its shabby architecture left over from the Cold War era, Cristian Mungiu's satirical drama Graduation is a portrait of a European society coming off the rails, its moral compass left to rust. At its center is Romeo Aldea, a frustrated Romanian surgeon with an impatient mistress, a distant, depressed wife, and one overriding ambition: to see his daughter Eliza graduate with honors so that she can attend college in London and escape permanently from their dreary, bureaucracy-controlled Transylvanian town.…
From the opening shot of its protagonist's drab neighborhood, its shabby architecture left over from the Cold War era, Cristian Mungiu's satirical drama Graduation is a portrait of a European society coming off the rails, its moral compass left to rust. At its center is Romeo Aldea, a frustrated Romanian surgeon with an impatient mistress, a distant, depressed wife, and one overriding ambition: to see his daughter Eliza graduate with honors so that she can attend college in London and escape permanently from their dreary, bureaucracy-controlled Transylvanian town.…