Sundance Selects
Graduation, written and directed by Cristian Mungiu, is an incisive exploration of expansion – educational and travel-based – through archetypal Jupiter.
The humans caught up in this dyad are Romeo Aldea (Adrian Titieni), a respected physician in a small town, whose daughter Eliza (Maria Dragus) is about to graduate from high school. She’s a good student, with an excellent chance of securing a scholarship to attend university in England. Sending her to greener pastures, away from the hellhole that is Romania, suits Romeo just fine.
However, immediately prior to her taking these critical tests that will determine her future, Eliza is injured while fighting off a sexual assault, which results in an academically poor performance. Eliza has a Romanian boyfriend, and now she’s not even sure embracing new horizons is what she truly wants.
Along with trying to change her mind, Romeo feels he must do what’s required to get her grades up – expand them – by working his own list of contacts so that one person forwards him to another person, and so on. But even if he finds a fixer, Eliza will have to be complicit in Dad’s scheme.
Should a father, now stuck on a government treadmill and who knows what would ultimately serve his daughter best, behave in the same rigid fashion as the state officials in his own country to force her to participate in the cheat? Or should parents’ goal be that their children remedy their own mistakes?
Graduation asks a prickly question. How far can one enlarge reality – here, defined grades and moral choices – for a so-called good cause? Especially given that Jupiter also rules the legal system.
Archetype: Graduate. Knowledge. Expansion. Education. Law.
Astrology Archetype: ♃ (Jupiter)
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