What’s ‘Fjord’ About? A Political Stance That May Be Too Hot to Handle

“Fjord,” Cristian Mungiu’s harrowing and pointedly provocative political drama, has now been open for two weeks, and I have a question about it: Where’s the debate? Where’s the fervor, the fire, the discussion, the arguments, the noise, the sense that a movie like this one matters? Everyone is talking about “You Can See Everything,” parsing the nuances of deceit and what is reality and should we blame it on Billy Evans? (we should not). And that’s a conversation well worth having. But when I saw “Fjord” at the Cannes Film Festival in May, I thought it was a movie that would unleash 1,000 conversations, including some highly incendiary ones, since it’s a film that cuts to the spiritual-ideological heart of so much of what’s happening today.

Instead…crickets. Oh, I see the occasional comment on social media, and I’ve encountered a few passionate and withering denunciations of “Fjord.” But where are the defenders, as well as the fireworks of disagreement?

I think the lack of debate goes back to an experience I had at Cannes that I found at once unsettling and revealing. “Fjord” was quite the conversation piece there — and it won the Palme d’Or, which is one reason it was instantly spoken of as an Oscar contender, not just for best international feature but, potentially, for best picture. I expected “Fjord” to set the media ablaze when it opened. But my experience of how people reacted to it in Cannes is that almost everyone seemed to resist saying out loud what the movie is actually about.

In “Fjord,” Mungiu tells the story of a family — Mihai Gheorghiu (Sebastian Stan), who’s Romanian; his wife, Lisbet (Renate Reinsve), who’s Norwegian; and their five children — who have moved from Bucharest to the picturesque Norwegian coastal village that Lisbet is from. The place feels like a tranquil utopia, and for a short while their lives are good. But then, at school, a phys-ed teacher…