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4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007)
4 luni, 3 saptamâni si 2 zile, Romania/Belgium, 113 minutes
Director: Cristian Mungiu
Writers: Cristian Mungiu, Razvan Radulescu
Photography: Oleg Mutu
Editor: Dana Bunescu
Cast: Anamaria Marinca, Laura Vasiliu, Vlad Ivanov, Alex Potocean, Luminita Gheorghiu, Ioan Sapdaru
This small-scale and ferociously intense story of late-period Communism, determinedly minute in scope and set in 1987 Romania towards the end of the harsh regime of Nicolae Ceausescu, made such a terrific impact on me the first time I saw it that I wasn't sure I wanted to see it again any time soon. When I finally did return to it recently I was interested to see just how much the sophistication of its aesthetics contributed to my first experience—and how carefully and deliberately the whole thing is put together.
The premise is so simple it feels almost cold in its calculation (and yo heads up spoilers begin now). Gabita (played by Laura Vasiliu) is pregnant and needs an abortion, which is illegal. She enlists her fellow student, roommate, and friend Otilia (played by Anamaria Marinca with a disaffected nonchalance that is often brilliant) to help her. The entire picture is a chronicle of their efforts to accomplish this on the day set for it—borrow the rest of the money they expect they will have to pay, connect with the abortionist, find a hotel room in which the procedure can take place, dispose of the fetus, and so on. All of this is set against a stifling inertia of bureaucracy and queasy numb apathy that hovers ineffably and penetrates all, like miasma in a swamp.
The movie has no political agenda about abortion at all, I suppose I should say. It could never have been made in present-day America (or even America of 1987), an interesting enough sidelight. Rather, it takes the need for occasional terminations of pregnancies as a given of the human condition, youth, and sexuality. It finds the subject a useful way in to a larger theme: the pervasiveness of intrusion and its humiliations in a society that does not particularly prize privacy. At the same time it appears perfectly comfortable with how much discomfort it knows it is likely to provoke. But always the approach, paradoxically enough, is with a light hand, bearing the mask of a finely tuned thriller.
Director and writer Cristian Mungiu's filmmaking is bracingly confident, even though this is just his second feature. He relies quite a bit on long takes, with the camera equally willing to move or to hold still and watch. When the camera moves it's evident someone is there, holding it, or walking just behind usually Otilia as she goes from place to place. This contributes even more to the sense of the picture's constant assaults, large and small, on privacies we take for granted. There is a telling acceptance among all of the characters that one is always being watched, one way or another. Part of daily life is to accommodate that.
As the picture goes on, Mungiu begins to cut off people or parts of their bodies with the frame. We see their chests but not their faces, for example. In a dinner party scene, we hear the voices but don't see the faces of people beyond either side of the frame. Again, this adds to the sense of violations of privacy. The camera and we by proxy are physically too close. In the last third, after dark, Mungiu is unafraid to let the frame go mostly black, as Otilia wanders the streets and up and down alleys and into the stairways of buildings, trying not to draw attention to herself when she encounters strangers.
More than anything, however, and ultimately what makes it work, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is a very sharply drawn character study. As Gabita's irresponsibility and unwillingness to confront her situation continually lead to further and further dire consequences, with which the vaguely cynical Otilia just persists in coping (albeit with the ends plainly fraying), it veers toward becoming a kind of carnival-night hellhouse ride, an over-the-top exercise poised to explode unpleasantly at any moment in some potently visceral way. Once started, the skin never stops crawling, and the picture remains steadfastly believable even as the most outrageously unbelievable things begin to occur.
With Gabita and Otilia grounded so naturally in their environments as college students, they bear a universality or a familiarity, within which we can see they are people in their early 20s we have known and consorted with ourselves. And just when we are coming to realize, remembering them, that we had maybe better stop caring so much about them, that's when it's too late. We care. The screenplay is a marvel of efficiency, hooking one in helplessly, operating in fast strokes at the brainstem level.
Though it often feels clinical and studiously free of emotion itself, this is a film that knows well the reactions it is expecting to provoke, and they are not cerebral. The narrative here is so insanely compelling, so effortlessly a claw-the-armrest suspenser, that it can be easy to miss the art, and so, as if to remind us of the art, Mungiu picks a way to end it that is so sharply abrupt it can't help calling attention to itself. In that moment of confusion, even as the relief of its being finally over sets in, it forces you to look again and think and realize what an impeccable moment of timing it is—as, indeed, the whole movie, from start to finish, can fairly be characterized as a series of impeccable moments of timing.
Top 10 of 2007
I count this as an auspicious year in the movies for me because it's when I got my Netflix account. I didn't actually start going out to the movies again for a couple more years, so most of the renowned bountiful harvest of 2007 I have caught up with after the fact on DVD. And yes, I'm in agreement that this was a great year for movies, probably the best for the 2000s so far still, I would say. After my first three picks, and down to approximately #20, there's a bunch of movies that have still not settled well into position (not to mention the usual pesky gaps). Those that could well appear in future revisions of my top 10 include Crazy Love, No Country for Old Men, Chop Shop, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I'm Not There., The Darjeeling Limited, Eastern Promises, and Ratatouille, not to mention the three other movies I wrote up below, all of which I liked too. These are good problems to have.
1. Zodiac
2. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
4. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
5. My Kid Could Paint That
6. The Savages
7. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
8. [•REC]
9. Sicko
10. Death Proof
Didn't like so much: Across the Universe, The Counterfeiters, Margot at the Wedding, Sweeney Todd, 300
Gaps: Charlie Wilson's War; Lust, Caution; My Winnipeg; Planet Terror; Superbad
Other write-ups: Grace Is Gone, In the Valley of Elah, Taxi to the Dark Side
Posted by Jeff Pike at 7:08 AM
Labels: 2007, movie of the year, TSPDT-21
Mon-sewer Paul Regret 11:00 AM, March 23, 2012
"Disaffected nonchalance" is a perfect way to describe Marinca in this movie. Which is why I was startled when she turned up in a film I watched earlier in the week, and she was rather effervescent. She's got range.
Joel Bocko 7:47 AM, October 24, 2012
Excellent film and it was a very strong year - kind of a diamond in the 00s rough really particularly when it comes to American cinema.
I'm guessing, seeing that again you've gone with a #2 film, you're choosing to focus on films you haven't written about before?
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movie of the year
1943: Shadow of a Doubt
1944: Double Indemnity
1945: Brief Encounter
1946: The Best Years of Our Lives
1947: Out of the Past
1948: Sorry, Wrong Number
1949: On the Town
1950: Night and the City
1951: The Day the Earth Stood Still
1952: Ikiru
1953: Madame de...
1954: Journey to Italy
1955: East of Eden
1956: The Girl Can't Help It
1957: 12 Angry Men
1958: The Big Country
1959: North by Northwest
1960: The Apartment
1961: Yojimbo
1962: Cleo From 5 to 7
1963: The Great Escape
1964: Kwaidan
1965: The Sound of Music
1966: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
1967: Wait Until Dark
1968: Rosemary's Baby
1969: Midnight Cowboy
1970: Gimme Shelter
1971: A Clockwork Orange
1972: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
1973: The Mother and the Whore
1974: Lenny
1975: Nashville
1976: Network
1977: Annie Hall
1978: Gates of Heaven
1979: Manhattan
1980: The Elephant Man
1981: Blow Out
1982: Fanny and Alexander
1983: Videodrome
1984: Stop Making Sense
1985: Ran
1986: Hannah and Her Sisters
1987: Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story
1988: Dead Ringers
1989: Do the Right Thing
1990: Goodfellas
1991: Dogfight
1992: Unforgiven
1993: Short Cuts
1994: Pulp Fiction
1995: Safe
1996: Trainspotting
1997: The Ice Storm
1998: The Last Days of Disco
1999: Eyes Wide Shut
2000: Amores Perros
2001: A.I. Artificial Intelligence
2002: City of God
2003: The Triplets of Belleville
2004: Mean Girls
2005: The Squid and the Whale
2006: Friends With Money
2007: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
2008: Dear Zachary
2009: The White Ribbon
2010: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
2011: Melancholia
2012: A.K.A. Doc Pomus
2013: Only Lovers Left Alive
2014: Love & Mercy
2015: Experimenter
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