“Fjord” reveals the paradoxes of the Scandinavian paradise. Mungiu’s film

“Protecting citizens from themselves.” According to Gunnar Myrdal, a Swedish economist in the 1930s and one of the architects of the Scandinavian welfare state, this was the ultimate aim of governments. On Monday at the Rome Film Festival, an attentive audience grasped the full implications of Myrdal’s words after the preview of Fjord, the film by Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year. A stark, slow-paced work, composed of superhuman silences and the profound stillness typical of the Nordic world, it nonetheless conveys devastating truths and unspeakable ambiguities. Fjord tells the story of a family—with a Romanian father, a Norwegian mother and five children of varying ages, from the eldest, who are teenagers, to the youngest, still in nappies—who move to a remote village in Norway (hence the title). The family is deeply religious, practising an ancient, rural form of Christianity that forbids technology and imposes prayer. As is the case in any close-knit community, the village is small and gossip spreads. But in this Scandinavian country, mechanisms—both official and subconscious—are set in motion that are more reminiscent of Kafka than of provincial life. A small bruise on the eldest daughter’s shoulder alerts social services, who immediately take the children into care and put the parents on trial. We shall refrain from revealing the ending.

It is easy to see from this plot the morbid fascination held by a story of abducted children, not unlike the one that made the headlines with Bibbiano or, more recently, with the ‘forest family’. But the film presents a far more powerful case study of what it means to live in an omnipresent and thoroughly ultra-technocratic state. Having lived in Denmark for over a decade while working within its government, I gained the deep conviction that the Scandinavian state is founded on citizens’ blind and extreme trust in its institutions. I, too, was the happiest man in the world to pay taxes there. In return, however, it demands a consensus and a conformity based on written and unwritten rules—sometimes merely hinted at—that express an unquestionable and often never truly articulated moral judgment on the goodness, or otherwise, of every citizen.

For the 98 per cent of society that conforms, Scandinavia is paradise on earth: open, tolerant, progressive. It is no coincidence that it tops all manner of global rankings, often even contradictory ones: from social equality to competitiveness and, yes, even happiness. For the 2 per cent who cannot or will not conform – whether because they are foreigners or perhaps just a little individualistic – society will make their lives a living hell, but through that cruel form of bureaucratic civilisation that the film depicts so well. As in a Kafkaesque trial, the individual bangs their head against a rubber wall that offers no answers. It is a system that feeds on the distortions it creates, generating a chain of services, increasingly subcontracted to private firms, which are handsomely rewarded with the money of happy taxpayers.

This represents the dark side of the Nordic paradox, but also serves as a warning to all Western societies that have viewed technocratic, cold and predictable centralism as the ultimate solution to all their ills. Democracies are composed of flesh-and-blood human beings who make mistakes, shout, take pleasure and rejoice in ways that are unique to each person, family, culture and religion. The moment we deny all this, we become anti-human or perhaps, as is already happening, post-human.