‘4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days’ Movie Review
The setting for this grippingly horrible movie is Romania, in 1987: that is, two years before Nicolae Ceausescu was executed, but nine years after he was awarded an honorary knighthood by the Labour government of James Callaghan - and 20 years after he had outlawed abortion in Romania to increase the birth rate.
It all seems at once a very distant and very recent era, and I can’t think of a film that has shown life in the eastern bloc more fiercely than this; without ever being overtly political, it makes you feel humanity itself being coarsened and degraded by the state. In recent memory, we’ve seen The Lives of Others and Good Bye Lenin!, which affected to be about the last days of European communism, and they have been very effective in their own differing ways, but outclassed and made to look lenient and inauthentic by this brutal masterwork.
Cristian Mungiu’s film is a nightmare of social-realist suspense, a jewel of what it is now considered the Romanian new wave, along with Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr Lazarescu and Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest. In more general terms, it is part of that emerging 21st-century phenomenon, ordeal cinema: a cinema that with great formal technique makes you live through a horrendous experience in what seems like real time. As a drama, it is superbly observed and telling in every subtle detail; yet it is also simply as exciting, in its stomach-turning way, as any thriller.
Anamaria Marinca and Laura Vasilu play Otilia and Gabriela, two students in their early 20s who share a tatty dorm in a provincial Romanian town. Otilia is relatively shrewd and worldly wise with a steady boyfriend; poor Gabriela, by contrast, is clueless, spacey, prone to getting things wrong.
But this may be a function of her present situation: Gabriela is pregnant, and Otilia has selflessly volunteered to hold her friend’s hand through the illegal abortion she herself has procured. It will be Otilia’s job to borrow the cash, to arrange the hotel room, and to liaise with the abortionist himself, called Bebe (Vlad Ivanov). It is only when these two scared young women are alone with this man in the hideous hotel room that the real hell of their situation reveals itself.
