Extra credit

Bacalaureat (Graduation)

Crit

Oh, you know I'm a sucker for a good daddy-daughter story. The daddy (Romeo, Adrian Titieni) and daughter (Eliza, Maria-Victoria Dragus, putting me in mind of a young Lauren Ambrose) in question live in Cluj, Romania, which, strictly from the evidence of this film, is where you'd start if were gonna give Europe a colonoscopy. So you can understand what it means to Romeo and Magda (Lia Bugnar) that their daughter is on the cusp of a scholarship to Cambridge.

But she is assaulted a few days before the first part of a clinching examination, and though she escapes being raped, she takes the test with the sprained wrist of her writing hand in a cast and with her mind understandably unfocused. So Romeo, a doctor at the local hospital, calls in some favors in order to tilt her final score toward what it would have been without the disruption.

A couple of problems with this plan: first, Romeo is circumstantially complicit in the assault, because instead of delivering her to the door of her school that day, he accepted her offer to hop out a short walk through a construction site away--accepted her offer because it was more convenient for his next stop, at his mistress's flat. So onto his ambition for her is ladled guilt.

But the second problem is bigger, because in a culture of corruption, Romeo and Magda have raised Eliza to recognize the right thing, and to do it. And since the plan requires her to make recognizable marks on her test paper, the plan can't be executed without her knowing the moral compromises at hand.

Another story I'm a sucker for: good people drawn into badness by a randomly hateful universe. Another such I liked was 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, which shared with this one a writer and director: Cristian Mungiu.