Review of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

Mungiu's "Abortion" Drama Is A High-Water Mark Of The Romanian New Wave

by Zachary Wigon 

It's no illusion that the Romanian film world has been thriving as of late. Two years ago, The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu was brought to New York and opened to significant critical acclaim. This past year marked the release of 12:08 East Of Bucharest, another Romanian film that was well received (I missed it). The peak of this "Romanian New Wave" was certainly hit when, this past May, Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days won the Palme d'Or, the Cannes Film Festival's highest award. One thing that these films have in common (amongst many others) is that they are all about bureaucracy - either attempting to master it or working around it, the films display what it was like to try to get something as simple as health care or an abortion in a communist system that has a vastly labyrinthine structure. As such, while 4 Months has been referred to as an "abortion drama," it is not really about abortion at all; abortion is just the MacGuffin, the element that needs to be there so the film can exist. Rather, the abortion at the center of the film is just an excuse to explore the culture and infrastructure of a crumbling communist country. The film takes place in Romania, 1987 - just two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Anamaria Marinca stars as Otilia, a college student who is helping her friend Gabriela (Laura Vasiliu) to get an abortion. What's interesting about such countries in Eastern Europe during this time was that, as so many illegal goods or services (certain brands of cigarettes or wines, an abortion) were strongly desired, a black market developed that was essentially a mirror image of the "proper" marketplace where one purchased legal items. The governments were aware of such practices, and allowed them to flourish - needed them to - as a sort of excessive under-support of their own economy. Needless to say, getting Gabriela an abortion is not as easy as one might imagine. The "doctor" (Vlad Ivanov) is a figure that goes from curt and acerbic to simply chilling. I will proceed no further, at the risk of giving away key plot details. One of the interesting things about 4 Months is that the entire film consists of basically three scenes: the opening scene in Gabriela and Otilia's dorm room, where they discuss preparing to get the hotel room; the scene in the hotel room with the doctor, where they discuss the procedure and payment; and a scene later on, where Otilia has dinner with her boyfriend's family and friends. In these three sequences - but especially the second and third - Mungiu's still, yet handheld camera and extremely long takes serve to build a significant amount of dread. Suspense, however, is not all that Mungiu is after; there is a certain objectivity provided in the long takes, a certain distance created from the characters that allows us to see the greater levers of Romanian society at work, pulling and pushing this way and that. The third sequence - Otilia's dinner - is the high point of the film, a masterful scene (all done in one shot, if I'm not mistaken) that displays Otilia's claustrophobic vulnerability as well as the existence, hopes and anxieties of the Romanian bourgeoisie. 4 Months is a film that should absolutely be seen by anyone interested in Eastern Europe during communism; it's almost anthropological in its angle towards the subject matter. One can only hope that this Romanian wave keeps flowing in.

Posted on 01/29/08 by: FC Scribes 04:04 PM