February 15, 2008 | In the world according to 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Cristian Mungiu’s bleakly fascinating view of life in Romania near the end of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s iron-fisted rule, day-to-day survival requires the patience to deal with deprivation – and the resourcefulness to deal, period.
While some people dutifully take their place in the long lines that spill out of stores with precious little to sell, others bargain with friends, strangers, black marketers – with anyone, really – for “luxuries” such as make-up, coffee or American cigarettes. When it comes to obtaining scarce goods or illegal services, bartering is commonplace, illegal trafficking is routine. If you can scrape together enough money, and contact the right people, and you’re not averse to enduring everything from petty humiliations to grave risks, you can get almost anything you want.
Even an abortion.
It’s a wintry day in 1987 — two years before Ceauşescu’s overthrow and execution, which Mungiu assumes we already know, and doesn’t announce – and Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), a wan and waiflike college student, finds herself inconveniently pregnant. So she seeks assistance from Otilla (Anamaria Marinca, arresting and Oscar-worthy), her stronger-willed roommate, to obtain an abortion in a country at a time when abortions are, though likely frequent, highly illegal.
While Gabita remains too tremulous to do much of anything, Otilla handles all the advance planning and heavy lifting – raising money, negotiating with a back-alley abortionist, booking a hotel room for the surreptitious procedure – with equal measures of weary resignation and grim determination. Her stoic demeanor suggests this isn’t the first time she’s had to help her friend deal with the consequences of a very big mistake. (Mungiu slyly indicates that Gabita survives not despite, but because of, her weakness.) Otilla even manages to maintain her calm – though just barely — when the abortionist (played as a soft-spoken, eminently reasonable monster by Vlad Ivanov) demands, and extracts, extra payment from both women for his services.
Otilla may feel shamed and exploited, but she does what she has to do. Because when everything has its price, prices must be paid.
Proceeding with a blunt and sometimes brutal relentlessness, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days impresses and engrosses as a work of stark, spare naturalism. Events unfold as a series of sharply observed episodes over the course of a single, dreary day, depicted with an austerity that might shame even a master of minimalism like Robert Bresson. Mungiu occasionally uses a hand-held camera to follow his characters during their anxious sprinting and morose trudging, More often, though, he keeps the camera still and steady, allowing characters to wander in and out of the frame, and remaining discreetly far enough away so that key events – most notably, the actual abortion – take place just beyond our point of view. Mungiu observes – impassively, nonjugmentally – and asks us to share his sympathetic but unsentimental point of view.
Even though there is much here to upset both pro-lifers and pro-choicers, Mungiu’s film isn’t “about” abortion. Ultimately, this audaciously unvarnished drama, made with an artlessness that doubtless is more apparent than real, is a study in contrasts and a story of survival. Under the tyranny of a Ceauşescu, some are too weak – or too selfish – to risk resistance, and request or cajole others to take all the risks. But then there are people like Otilla, who somehow manage to compartmentalize their emotions – note how she deals with the demands of her boyfriend on the same day that she she’s helping Gabita – while resolutely pushing forward, persisting and improvising to get by, because she must.
The crowning achievement of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is its ability to make us consider both women as metaphorical figures – representing Mungiu’s generation of survivors — and, at the same time, appreciate them as thoughtfully and vividly rendered human beings.
(Originally appeared in The Houston Chronicle)
