Last year, American multiplexes were inundated with strong, capable, unexpectedly pregnant women who had made up their minds: They were keeping their babies, ooh, ohh. But at least the potential mothers of Waitress, Knocked Up and Juno had a choice. Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), one of the two Romanian women at the center of Cristian Mungiu’s gripping 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which won the top prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, desperately wants to abort her fetus, which, per the title, is already halfway through the gestation process. But the film is set in 1987, at the end of the Ceausescu era, when abortion was illegal and scarcity was the norm in every aspect of citizens’ harried lives. With the help of her much more capable roommate, Otilia (the astonishing Anamaria Marinca), Gabita secures an appointment with the sinister-looking Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov), an unlicensed “physician” who resembles Vera Drake in no way, shape or form. Trouble is, Mr. Bebe wants more money for his services than Otilia and Gabita are able to scrape together. But perhaps something could be arranged ...
Truth is, I’ve already done this remarkable movie a disservice, albeit an inevitable one, simply by telling you what it’s ostensibly about. At Cannes, it instantly became known as “the Romanian abortion movie”—an intriguing form of shorthand, really, since that phrase is three syllables longer than the admittedly lengthy title. (What’s wrong with 432?) But while Mungiu doesn’t shy away from the real-world implications of Gabita and Otilia’s actions—even going so far as to include a controversial close-up of the aborted fetus lying bloody and forlorn on the bathroom floor—his intentions are political in a much broader and less potentially divisive sense. Indeed, it’s only perhaps half an hour into the film that it even becomes clear what traumatic event these young women are working to arrange; if you go into it with no foreknowledge, as I did, the air is thick with apprehensive mystery. And viewers whose thoughts aren’t leaping ahead to the back-alley procedure will likely find it that much easier to take stock of what Mungiu is really doing.
From its opening frames, 432 (ahem) casually immerses us in a world of universal deprivation, following Otilia as she roams her dormitory hall in search of black-market soap and cigarettes. (Favored brands: Lux and Kent, respectively.) Offhand exchanges are pregnant with detail: When Otilia briefly meets with her boyfriend, who’s lending her some of the money Gabita needs for Mr. Bebe, he casually mentions that his mother had to wake up ludicrously early to do some baking, because the gas pressure drops after 8 a.m. Even the relatively simple (from our perspective) act of securing a hotel room for Gabita’s abortion turns into a Kafka-esque nightmare involving a series of blandly efficient, utterly unsympathetic functionaries. Negotiation and solidarity are the twin subjects of this quietly impressive docudrama, and Mungiu’s commitment to verisimilitude is so scrupulous that he deliberately introduces the equivalent of Chekhov’s famed gun without the slightest intention of providing a final-act payoff. It’s a pointed hint that what’s truly of note is happening mostly in the margins.
Following on the heels of Cristi Puiu’s highly acclaimed but little-seen The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, 432 has been declared the crest of a Romanian new wave. Both films were shot in patient, lengthy takes by ace cinematographer Oleg Mutu, and both are closely observed exercises in painstaking naturalism. But while Mungiu shares his countryman’s wryly disgusted take on bureaucratic insensitivity, this nonstop anxiety-fest could never be mistaken, as Lazarescu frequently was, for black comedy. Mostly, that’s thanks to Marinca, who portrays Otilia with an unshowy, no-nonsense fortitude that makes her a formidable presence even when she’s at her most halting or uncertain. (The film’s high point is a single eight-minute shot of Otilia at her boyfriend’s mother’s birthday party, silently trapped in a sea of burble and clearly able to think of nothing but what’s happening to Gabita back at the hotel.) Lazarescu troubled me because the title character seemed a mere victim of institutional indifference. Mungiu’s film, by contrast, is all about agency—which is to say, about choice.
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
****
Anamaria Marinca, Laura Vasiliu, Vlad Ivanov
Directed by Cristian Mungiu
Not rated