Maria-Victoria Dragus and Adrian Titieni (IFC)

Does following in your parent’s footsteps mean succumbing to a corrupt system? The riveting drama Graduation is a familiar story of a father wanting what’s best for his daughter, but what unspools is a case study of a broken society.

Romeo (Adrian Titieni) is a middle-aged doctor who wants his 18-year old daughter Eliza (Maria-Victoria Dragus) to study abroad, and it’s crucial that she does well on her graduation exams. But shortly before her exams, Eliza is assaulted near campus, and strains her wrist; dad finds out in the middle of a tryst with a former patient (Malina Manovici).

As police look for the attacker, Romeo worries that Eliza’s injury will make it hard for her to take her bacalaureat, and she needs to knock it out of the park to get into Cambridge. Despite the objections of his wife (Lia Bugnar), Romeo tries to curry favor with school administrators to give his daughter an extra push.

This is just one piece of a broader puzzle: from police investigations to liver transplants to graduation scores, the movie is a daisy chain of everybody scratching each other’s backs to get around the rules.

Director Cristian Mungiu (Beyond the Hills) depicts a world where official favors are almost expected; these aren’t the desperate machinations of a sleazy underground but the seemingly everyday behavior of the middle class, and his unglamorous cast all convey the dreary realism of a society rotting from within. While films out of the Romanian New Wave can be severe and slow going (the 2009 film Police, Adjective is an example of its excellent, frustrating peak), Graduation is well-paced, its 128 minutes passing by easily.

The Romanian title of the film is Bacalaureat, which means an approximate English title might have been SAT. But the lessons learned here are stark, the character development destructive.

It’s no spoiler to note that the film ends with Eliza’s graduation. While a John Hughes movie might have presented this milestone in the life of a young woman as a moment of possibility and hope, and a tender moment between father and daughter, Mungiu notes it as an already lost opportunity to educate, a passing down not of good genes but of a national crisis.

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Graduation
Written and directed by Cristian Mungiu
With Adrian Titieni, Maria-Victoria Dragus, Rares Andrici
Rated R for some language
128 minutes
Opens today at Landmark E Street Cinema.