Graduation (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

Who hasn’t been there, more or less or somewhat?You’ve made careful, tight barriers between the various realms you have to navigate. Which you need to use, placate, appease. Where you seek refuge. Where you want to flourish. But how tough, extreme should those barriers be? As iron bars of a cage?Professionally, you’re part of a system, an organization designed to run rationally. And you navigate through others modeled much the same — impersonal, preferably inexorable as a math proof, a machine, strictly by the rules and numbers. Above manipulation by petty politics or personal predilections, whims. For the best results: personal little needs, inclinations, favors are kept within strict bounds, at the margins. Moaning, pouting, crying too, only muss up the machinery. You know that. Calm, cool planned persistence will win. No crying in this game.You want it that way. Especially in systems for doctoring, educating, governing, law and policing. Because you’ve seen the malfunctions, corruptions, cruelties caused or fed, fattened by unconstrained predispositions, predilections, whims. Especially when too few, too feeble restraints, checks, balances allow those with authority and power to trump and run rampant, make personal whims, temptations, favors tools of tyranny.You try to turn yourself within your professional domain of mastery into a rational, logical machine — for the good, personal and greater, within set limits. And you take stoic pride in your accomplishments despite the knowledge that your domain of mastery is only a small subset within the vast set of irrationality’s rampages.While home is the haven where you try to keep out both irrational storms and inhumane systematization; to nurture better hopes, desires …But suddenly, barriers break, shatter. Break between the refuge of home, family, heart and whatever’s out there at large. Between your better conscience and some needs you’ve preferred to keep hidden, and others for which you thought the systems you begrudgingly support were sufficient. Trusted barriers now look more like illusions, delusions. You suddenly feel more severely the friction, the sore chafing between the personal, internal, intimate and those external objective systems. Aches you thought you had under control surface with unexpected complications, frustrations. You’re suddenly in need to take your private public, to plead before universal reason or unreason or its masks, while losing confidence in your ability to tell them apart. You know the systems well enough, and you have like-minded friends in the right places with the right connections, to make the maneuvers. You tell yourself that sometimes one has to bend, break the bars of reason’s iron barriers. And the heart too has its reasons. But with all the broken barriers in rational man's quest for utopia, comes the revelation of an infernal labyrinth …I’ve gone on in this general, somewhat generic, abstract manner to stress, boost, flaunt that this is not a film only about Romania and what happens way over there, in a galaxy far far away. The makers of this film have made the specific dilemmas of particular people in a particular place and time so vividly, intensely present with such density that it breaks through to the universal — to what’s going on all over now, yesterday, tomorrow. There and where you are. The unique and universal cohabit. Great art makes that reality present, brings the connections you know you need.This is a film to buy, to support more from such makers. And to watch as a personal favor to your own best intentions, predilections, necessities.

A great film by a great young director.

This surely must be one of the finest films made in recent decades. Of course, I haven't seen them all––I have seen a lot––but film-making of this quality just shouts its name. The film is set in modern Romania. It is about a crucial week in the lives of a married couple with a daughter sitting her high school graduation exams. The father, a doctor, is intent on her doing well enough to take up a scholarship at an English university. He wants her to escape what he sees as the mire of Romanian society, where pervasive corruption is a daily rebuke to his own basic decency. That's where it is best to leave off the synopsis. The film starts from this premise and takes the viewer on a compelling, penetrating study of the nature of goodness and the ethical conundrums that life throws up, especially for those who have a conscience. There is real dramatic tension in the story-telling, so this film of ideas is also a powerful emotional experience. Anyone interested in what modern cinema can achieve should not miss this film.

Interesting movie about ethics and morality.