Philadelphia Weekly

"By no means is it a film that takes sides and says abortion is good or abortion is immoral," says Cristian Mungiu, on the phone from Romania, about his new film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. "I wanted to tell a story, not make a political statement."

Such fence-sitting is par for the course for those who've made the many films about abortion over the last year. 4 Months debuted last April at the Cannes Film Festival, where it took the Palme d'Or. Since then the abortion issue has popped up in Waitress, Knocked Up, Bella, Juno and Tony Kaye's epic abortion-in-America documentary Lake of Fire. Of these, only Bella takes a definitive stand (anti), but even its director Alejandro Gomez Monteverde plays innocent as to where his film stands on the issue.

On its face, Mungiu's case seems no different. 4 Months depicts the grim path a woman (Anamaria Marinca) takes as she helps her roommate (Laura Vasiliu) seek an illegal abortion in 1987 Romania during the last days of the draconian Communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu. For Americans used to the heated abortion debate and possibly not far from seeing Roe v. Wade overturned, it's easy to read the film as a grim reminder of what could be.

But not so for Mungiu. "The film is not necessarily about what the main storyline is about," Mungiu says. "It's about what it signifies. I wanted to speak about the kind of relationships people had in the period, when it was very clear who was the common enemy. Because whenever people have a common enemy, people tend to experience much more solidarity than they do in a regular society.

"I could've chosen a different story or topic from the same period to speak about the same things."

The decision to ban abortion in Romania, enacted in 1966, wasn't a religious one. This was, after all, a Communist state. The real purpose of the law was to violently increase the population in Romania in an attempt to gain a bigger influence in the region. Women were encouraged to have at least four children. Those who had at least 10 were even awarded medals.

"It was a combination of a very pragmatic, economic decision with a propagandistic one, taken by someone who little by little became very dictatorial," Mungiu says. During the last days of Ceausescu, who was overthrown and executed in 1989, unexpected medical visits were even arranged to see who was pregnant and who was not.

"It is said that half a million women died in the process of having an illegal abortion from 1966 to 1989," Mungiu says, "because people weren't having any kind of education on this matter. As soon as abortion became legal in 1990, Romanian women started having 1 million abortions a year."

Watch 4 Months closely and you'll see abortion as just one of the many things difficult, if not impossible, to obtain in Communist Romania, including everything from hotel rooms to bath soap.

"It was important for me to capture the atmosphere of the period, this atmosphere of fear," Mungiu says. "For people [aged] 20 to 24, the system was very corrupt in influencing their decisions over the long term. Lots of people needed some years to understand which decisions belonged to them and which were a reaction to the society in which they lived."

And so unions formed, particularly among accidental roommates. "There was a special bond between [young roommates]," Mungiu says. "They had to share the same room in the student dormitory for some years. They would wind up sharing everything, from food to books to boys to feelings and emotions and intimate moments. Very often you would wind up with a closer relationship than with your mother or your sister."

4 Months is only the latest and most acclaimed in a new wave of films from Romania. The Communist period produced only propaganda, and the subsequent national cinema has yet to become a self-sustaining industry, each film requiring partial foreign backing. Yet films like 4 Months, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, 12:08 East of Bucharest and Mungiu's previous feature Occident--a comedy about post-Communist Romanian life--have caught on with festivals and distributors, making Romania the new "it" country for cinema.

"What makes it an interesting wave is that our films are quite different," Mungiu says. It's true the films vary in style and tone, though all are critical of Romania, either past or present. Not that being critical of one's homeland is a bad thing in Romania.

"There are lots of people [in Romania] who are very happy at the end of [4 Months] and say it's very good that nothing like this can happen today," Mungiu says. "Of course most of the filmmakers who are going to make a film about Romania today will speak about the problems that we're still having now and not necessarily focus on the good results."