Çisel Aktimur

Cristian Mungiu’s newest drama, “Fjord,” stars Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve as a conservative, evangelical couple who have recently moved with their five children from Bucharest to a tiny village on the Norwegian coast. One day, after bruises are spotted on one of their daughters' backs, Child Protective Services is called, and they are accused of physical abuse. Their children are taken from them. Some critics of the film, which won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, have accused Mungiu of drifting politically to the right. Some have taken “Fjord” as an embrace of a mealy-mouthed both-sidesism that holds the left to be as susceptible as the right to the traps of ignorance, groupthink, and discrimination. Others have implied that the film exaggerates and demonizes the Scandinavian welfare state’s overreach to an absurdly unrepresentative degree. “To which I can only answer that I’ve seen ‘Fjord’ twice now,” Justin Chang writes. “The reductive generalizations that its critics seem eager to ascribe to it strike me as fundamentally at odds with the angularity, specificity, and darkly comic pungency of Mungiu’s telling.” Read his review: newyorker.com/culture/the-cu…