He wants you to argue about his movie, even if you can’t pin him down politically

You probably don’t know much about Cristian Mungiu’s homeland of Romania.

He’s so aware of that fact, he even makes a joke about it in his latest film. Early on in “Fjord,” which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, a Norwegian schoolteacher welcomes a family of Romanian children. “We’re all very kind and friendly,” he assures them. “There’s no Dracula here.”

Speaking over Zoom from New York, dressed in his typical wardrobe of black shirt and black sport jacket, Mungiu is wryly amused when I ask if that Dracula dig was inspired by personal experience. “There are just two things that people know about Romania — aside from Nadia Comăneci — and it’s Dracula and Communism,” he says. “It’s something that all Romanians experience. We get used to it, but at the same time, it’s a bit annoying.”

Audiences have become accustomed to Mungiu pointing out uncomfortable truths. Beginning with his second feature, the 2007 abortion drama “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” (which also won the Palme), the 58-year-old Mungiu has crafted somber dramas that double as morality plays. But instead of preaching to the choir, he contends with society’s gray areas, never offering a solution — or even his own opinion — on the difficult topics at hand. Mungiu prefers to question, not reassure.

“As much as we all enjoy mainstream cinema and film as entertainment, that’s a way of making you sleep better after a week of work,” he says. “Yes, I want a thriller, I want to have tension, I want to keep people on the edge of their seat. But I don’t want to do this with guns and fast editing. I want to talk about things that could happen to you.”

“Fjord” is based on a controversial real-life 2015 case in which Norway’s child protective services sought to separate a couple from their five children on charges that the parents hit them. Thoughtful and measured, the movie stars Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve as a husband and wife enduring similar accusations. As in the true story, Stan’s character Mihai Gheorghiu is Romanian while Lisbet is Norwegian. Parents to a conservative religious family, they move to Lisbet’s childhood community, upsetting the progressive locals once it’s revealed that they practice corporal punishment.

Climaxing in a tense court case that hinges on what constitutes a slap, “Fjord” explores clashing cultures and mutual distrust, leaving us unsure how to feel. Are the Norwegian authorities concerned for children’s safety — or are they offended by this family’s rigidly patriarchal beliefs, which include intolerance toward homosexuality? Should the Gheorghius adjust to Norway’s customs? Or should the seemingly enlightened Norwegians be more understanding?

Making his first film outside Romania, Mungiu had been intrigued by the 2015 case, visiting the Norwegian town where the incident occurred and speaking to family members, judges and journalists. He was accompanied by a woman who drove him around. As Mungiu remembers, “One of the good things that happened during those three days was, at the end, this lady told me, ‘It’s good to be forced into this kind of investigation because I realized that I was very biased.’”

He hopes he’s provoked audiences to examine their own blind spots with “Fjord,” a pointed metaphor for society’s profound political and cultural divides. Because the movie shies away from condemnation, it has been labeled by some as a MAGA film for supposedly demonizing progressive Norway and making the conservative Gheorghius the victims.

Mungiu is used to his politically ambiguous films being interpreted in myriad ways. (Both sides of the abortion debate claimed “4 Months” as their own.) For him, “Fjord” is as much about living through Romania’s Communist period as it is about child-rearing.

“Communism was always this feeling that they know better what’s good for you,” he says. “I don’t want us to get back there. This is one of the reasons I made ‘Fjord.’ My freedom of making my own choices is more important than you pushing your values.”

Shooting “Fjord” in Norway, he developed an even greater appreciation for the local culture. But the tension he and his fellow Romanian crewmembers felt took a little while to dissipate.

“Every time we were scouting by boat, we would take our backpacks with us,” Mungiu recalls. “After a while, [the Norwegians] asked us, ‘Why do you do that?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s safer to take it with us.’ And they told us, ‘But you’re in Norway.’ I said, ‘Yes, but there are a lot of Romanians around.’ It’s not a polite joke, but it’s a way of telling them that we are aware of the stereotypes.”

Fans of Mungiu’s searing dramas might be surprised to hear him crack a joke. And in conversation, he does tend toward the somber. But when he first developed an interest in filmmaking, he had a lighter approach. “I started by being an author of comedies,” Mungiu says, “because it was easier to talk about these things.” His first feature, 2002’s “Occident,” was a bittersweet slice of life about struggling Romanians considering migrating west to find happiness.

Mungiu also began working on what would eventually become the subversive 2009 omnibus film “Tales From the Golden Age,” which riffed on Communist-era Romanian urban myths. But when he cast actors for “Tales” who were too young to remember Nicolae Ceaușescu’s reign, he was surprised that they didn’t see the underlying darkness beneath the film’s satiric tone. Mungiu worried the new generation may not fully appreciate the country’s terrible history.

“Humor was a way of surviving that period,” Mungiu recalls, “but it wasn’t funny at all.”

So, going forward, he decided to get real, endeavoring to make a “serious film about what it meant to become paranoid and have this feeling that there’s always an enemy following you.”

The result was the stark “4 Months,” which he describes as “a hit in the gut for many people.” He’s replicated its approach ever since and never looked back.

“Eventually,” he says, “you reach this age in which you have more courage. I think that I’m mature enough now to speak up about these things that you don’t want to listen to. I will take the risk of doing so.”

Mungiu’s prickly, nonjudgmental studies of human behavior have sometimes led him to be branded as a provocateur. But from his bashful demeanor to his disinterest in delivering inflammatory sound bites, it’s clear the soft-spoken Mungiu lacks the mischievous air of a contrarian.

“I’m on the same side with the storytellers who encourage people to think,” he says. “I couldn’t have a more sober approach to cinema. I try to have this neutral perspective but encourage your responsibility as a viewer to make something out of this story that I’m bringing in front of you. My main contribution is to tell you, ‘This is something that you need to talk about.’ But I’m trying not to tell you precisely what to think.”

These issues aren’t just political but personal for Mungiu. Fatherhood has been an invisible theme throughout his films. The 2016 drama “Graduation,” which involves a dad scheming to get his daughter’s poor test score revised so she can attend her dream university, was born out of Mungiu’s anxieties about wanting the best for his two children. Similarly, “Fjord” wrestles with what it means to be a good parent.

“I am not important any longer — most of my life is behind me — but I have children,” Mungiu says. “I don’t think it is responsible to deliver to them a world which is in this state of hatred. It’s not fair to say, ‘Well, this is as much as we could do. Take it from here and fix it.’ It’s not about what we tell our children — they see how we behave. We need to change the way we behave to give them a better example.”

Not everyone will accept “Fjord’s” invitation to reconsider their worldview. Doesn’t it get tiresome constantly offering audiences an opportunity to enter into a conversation when many won’t go in with an open mind?

The usually serious Mungiu at last allows himself a rare moment of deadpan.