‘Fjord,’ Faith, and the Paradox of Tolerance

The Free Press: ‘Fjord,’ and the Paradox of Tolerance, by Kat Rosenfield:

Based on a true story, the movie follows a devoutly Pentecostal couple, Mihai and Lisbet Gheorghiu, who emigrate along with their five children from conservative Romania to a remote village in liberal Norway, where Lisbet’s family lives—only to have their children taken away by the state, which objects to their traditional approach to parenting. Initially, the authorities claim that their investigation stems from credible allegations that the Gheorghius are beating the children by way of disciplining them. However, the ensuing trial reveals a deeper and thornier conflict, one between the religious values of the Gheorghius and the progressive ones favored by the Norwegian government—and becomes a microcosm for the frictions of cultural mixing in an age where welcoming immigrants has become a fundamental tenet of left-wing and progressive thought globally, but where the new arrivals often come armed with values, beliefs, and practices that make progressives profoundly uncomfortable. …

In Fjord, both the tension and inherent absurdity of a self-proclaimed liberal society trying to indulge in just a little authoritarianism, as a treat, are illustrated with exquisite subtlety. In one scene, Elia, the Gheorghius’ teenage daughter, is sitting at the piano in her school, playing a hymn—not that it’s recognizable as such, when she isn’t singing the lyrics, and there’s nothing about the melody itself to distinguish it from any other song. Still, the headmaster scolds her to stop: It’s not appropriate, he says, to engage in religious evangelism at school. Meanwhile, just down the hall, a group of children are being led in an exuberant hymn to the glory of cultural diversity—in preparation for the state-mandated “cultures day,” on which everyone in town will gather at the school for what is, for all intents and purposes, a secular Scandinavian tent revival. You see, it’s only evangelism if it comes from a Pentecostal teenage pianist; otherwise, it’s just sparkling ideological indoctrination.

But it is left to the audience to notice the eerie similarities between these socially liberal characters and the Bible-thumping zealots they claim to abhor—or to not notice it, which I imagine many won’t. Fjord is an objectively excellent film.

In an age where embracing the outsider has become a key measure of morality for people of certain political orientations, the vogue for open borders bumps uncomfortably against the natural human tendency to be suspicious of those unlike us. What Fjord illustrates is how progressives, having made it verboten to admit that they’re just as fearful and suspicious of the Other as anyone else, must find some other pretense to shun them, shame them, and force them to either assimilate or suffer the consequences. Here, that pretense is the specter of child abuse, which once invoked provides cover for all manner of profound, casual xenophobia. Both in litigation and behind closed doors, the Gheorghius’ neighbors mock their beliefs, their religious practices, and their parenting, openly speculating that it would be better to break up the family than to subject the children to the far worse trauma of being brought up by conservatives. Their sole ally is their lawyer and next-door neighbor, Mia, who plays the role of advocate—and sometimes devil’s advocate—but even she clearly thinks the family is weird.

What makes Fjord such an effective and beautiful work of cinema, as opposed to a clunky political parable, is that it makes no attempt to excuse or even explain the underlying machinery of the story, from the Gheorghius’ religious beliefs to the Norwegians’ progressive convictions. Mungiu allows the audience to understand his characters’ inner lives and motivations only to the same extent and in the same way that they understand each other’s: in glimpses, in fragments, in the type of conversation you might overhear through your neighbor’s window while passing beneath it outside. I was struck by the film’s matter-of-factness, its refusal to lead its audience by milking a single conflict, a single moment, for additional drama. Even the most tense exchanges, including the meeting in which representatives from the Norwegian child welfare agency, Barnevernet, inform Lisbet Gheorghiu that they’ll be taking her children, are conducted in barely-above-ASMR sotto voce. And the most anguished scene, when Lisbet is forced to relinquish her infant son to the authorities, is witnessed only from a distance, over the shoulder of her husband, as he witnesses the exchange from an upstairs window. His back is to the camera; we watch him, watching her, watching their baby bundled into a government car and driven away to God knows where. She doubles over in grief. He strikes a tabletop with his fist. We never know what was said in this moment, or after; we don’t even see their faces.

It is intriguing to imagine this story in the hands of a less restrained filmmaker, one with less trust in his audience. How easy it would have been to put a thumb on the scale, to indulge in caricature, to make unmistakable who is a victim and who is a villain—or even just to make explicit the underlying conflict between the professed ideals of a free society and the oppressive practices that result when a country decides to enforce tolerance with an iron fist. Instead, he examines the state’s own reasoning—as with the moment when a representative for the Norwegian government argues that the use of force to limit the spread of non-state-approved beliefs is not just the government’s privilege, but its sacred duty; if they don’t exert themselves to separate the Gheorghius’ children from their backward-thinking parents, he says, “Won’t we bear responsibility for letting the children be educated in this spirit?”

The answer to this, of course, is a host of other questions about just how brutally a country—any country—can enforce ideological conformity within its borders and still call itself “free.”

In America, and particularly in American media, this question invariably gets flattened beneath the framework of tribal polarization, where nuance goes to die. But Fjord sidesteps this debate, and is a better film for doing so. It is up to the audience to answer these questions—including the question that is unspoken but implicit at the end of the film, as the family, finally understanding that this tolerant progressive society is one in which they are not welcome, boards a ferry and flees back to the place where they came from.

Does this look like a happy ending to you?