Fjord

What makes a work of art bad? Distortions masking as ambiguities, manipulative devices in the lieu of complexity, are some answers. Why does bad art produce fury? But what can be most deceptive is the question of ideology. One might agree with the impulse or the underlying advocacy (if it's agit prop), but take dudgeon with the implementation. Similarly one might praise Riefenstahl for the classicism of Triumph of the Will, while detesting its point. Still it makes the cut. Fjord, which won the Palm D' Or at Cannes, is a particularly infuriating example of a disingenuous project that has, for some reason, gotten in under the wire. Basically it's l984 applied to a quasi socialist state which, in reality, happens to be an exemplary democracy. Borgen is a series about another Scandinavian democracy, Denmark. Compare that with the portraiture of officialdom in Fjord. The evil doers in the child protection unit are so thinly and stereotypically painted as to be unbelievable in any context. Ditto the judicial system of a country whose manners and mores, US. citizens might rather flee to than from, as have the Rumanian/Norwegian family at the center of the drama (which is, inadvertently, a love letter to MAGA btw). Apart from being untrue, the film doesn't rise to the level of manipulation since the viewer is liable to reject the garbled conceit at the center of the plot. This is not An Enemy of the People, the famous drama by the great Norwegian playwright which is a paradigm for the artist himself, isolated by his knowledge of a truth. The title of Ibsen's last work When We Dead Awaken, might be invoked here, simply as a call for that form of beauty which is truth.