Philadelphia Weekly

Winner of the Palme d'Or at last year's Cannes Film Festival and scandalously absent from this year's list of foreign-language Oscar nominees, writer/director Cristian Mungiu's harrowing 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days arrives on a tsunami of hype in cineaste circles. It's the latest entry in a Romanian neorealist new wave that recently saw ecstatic receptions (at least critically) for Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and Corneliu Porumboiu's 12:08 East of Bucharest.

4 Months is a grinding, expertly crafted slice of Eastern European miserablism, an unquestionably overpowering experience that nonetheless left this reviewer with a nagging sense of unease.

Set in the '80s, near the end of Nicolae Ceausescu's miserable reign, Four Months keeps the camera at a discreet distance, adopting a verite fly-on-the-wall style as we follow Otilia (Anamaria Marinca), a weary student hustling her way around a crowded, crummy dormitory, searching for a black-market pack of American cigarettes and making some sort of vague travel arrangements we understand only as the film wears on.

Slowly we glean that Otilia is helping to arrange an illegal abortion for her simpering roommate Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), a hapless wreck of a girl who's either utterly incapable of functioning as an adult, or is perhaps more likely shifting the burden onto her friend as a way of emotionally avoiding what's about to happen. Gabita blows every important detail of the covert operation, failing to confirm the hotel room booking, telling stupid untruths to the shady doctor, even forgetting the all-important plastic sheet--so it's Otilia to the rescue time and again, selflessly improvising, scrounging money and finally, against all odds, landing them alone with the skeezy abortionist (Vlad Ivanov) for one of the lengthiest, most skin-crawlingly unpleasant sequences in recent movie memory.

Mungiu has a way of letting scenes play out far longer than one would expect, shooting in wide-screen with a largely static camera, lingering to pick up details and inferences inside haunting, seemingly endless silences. The loathsome Dr. Bebe, played by Ivanov with nauseating entitlement and self-righteousness, isn't the kind of man who will come right out and demand his price. He talks in circles around the real cost of this dangerous procedure, the ickiness oozing to the surface almost in slow-motion. It's a genuinely horrifying depiction of exploitation and cruelty in a culture where life is cheap and women are considered worthless, and that's all before the actual abortion.

But Otilia soldiers on, stoically enduring, at one point even pulling herself together long enough to sneak away for a family party at the home of her boyfriend's parents. Mungiu's gutsiest gambit here is to leave the camera planted on Marinca's blank expression as the vapid cocktail chatter prattles on for what feels like hours, oblivious to the anguish staring us in the face.

It's not meant as a knock to call 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days punishing, but as fine a film as this is, my hesitancy to embrace it lies in a personal discomfort with this certain sub-genre.

Dating as far back as Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, art cinema has a longstanding and occasionally unsettling tradition of male filmmakers heaping obscene amounts of misery and humiliation upon their docile often passive female protagonists, ennobling them (and by extension the viewer) through suffering.

Whether we're talking about Robert Bresson's Mouchette, most Lars Von Trier movies, Lukas Moodysson's nigh-unwatchable Lilja-4-Ever or even the past couple of David Lynch flicks, it's a formula that works. Heck, some of those pictures might even be masterpieces, yet I'm also starting to wonder if a cinematic shorthand is emerging.

By the time 4 Months reaches its grueling finish, Otilia feels like a candidate for sainthood, but also something a bit fuzzier and hard to pin down. It's tough to shake the question while watching films of this sort: Have we truly been following a flesh-and-blood character, or just an angry filmmaker's symbolic dumping ground for a cruel world's abuses and ills?

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days