Dir. Cristian Mungiu, 2007, Romania, 113 mins, some subtitles
Cast: Anamaria Marinca, Laura Vasiliu, Vlad Ivanov
Review by Mike Bartlett
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days trails a formidable amount of praise in its wake; it was awarded the Palme d’Or and named Best Film of the Year in Sight and Sound. For that reason, it epitomises the new taste in film circles for stark realism – the “way it is” school of representation that wears its twin badges of honour – social and political polemic – openly and with pride. Certainly, second-time director Mungiu has a lot to be proud about. His story of two student friends trying to procure an illegal abortion in Ceausescu’s Romania is relentlessly compelling, beautifully acted and superbly controlled throughout. Long takes are used to particularly strong effect, ratcheting up the tension in strained dialogue scenes and keeping vital action off-screen for an unbearable amount of time. Nothing is allowed to impede the flow of the narrative nor puncture the carefully-constructed atmosphere of the period.
But what may be most valuable about the film is its corrective to certain liberal assumptions in the West. Because the same coterie of reviewers that value this so-called “gritty” realism often do so because of some rather simplistic Left-Wing tenets, and these are shattered by Mungiu’s unflinching portrait of Communism. Not only is this a system on the brink of collapse, with shortages and poverty ever present, but it’s a world where the absolute power held by the governing party drips down through the social strata to pollute the behaviour of the individual, leading to officiousness and petty-mindedness. Otilia’s attempts to secure a safe operation for her friend Gabita are not impeded by generals or committees but by a hotel receptionist who can wield her own bit of authority over a guest or a porter who, for the hell of it, phones the police.
Leftist critics would have us believe that capitalism forces everything in society to become a commodity, but Mungiu shows that the only difference in a Communist state is that the commodities are being sold on the back street - from the black market cigarettes stashed by a student to the foetus in Gabita’s womb. In such an environment, people’s true character becomes masked by the roles they’re forced to play. Is the abortionist who forces himself on Otilia a con man or a genuine medic? In the circumstances, what’s the difference? Add to that the portrayal of a system that educates its young to high standards and then buries them in a dead-end job in a godforsaken backwater, and you have a work that shows how Communism first determines, then destroys, the very thing at the centre of the film’s narrative – a life.
Ingeniously, Mungiu draws us into this world through the eyes of the long-suffering friend, rather than the pregnant woman herself. He wants to show how, in such a society, an individual’s problems become everyone else’s. Gabita is as much a product of Ceausescu’s society as the jobsworths who surround her; her ingrained naivete and selfishness are the long-term result of falling back on a totalitarian state and its culture of ignorance. Otilia, on the other hand, takes responsibility for her actions and, by doing so, exposes herself to danger, exploitation and blackmail. But the powers of state remain ‘hidden’; at the end, instead of being able to confront the mechanisms that have made their lives a misery, the two friends, like their fellow citizens, can only stare at each other in tense, mutual recrimination.
However, despite all of the above, I feel I must offer a cautionary note. The problem with such a determinedly realist film is that it leaves one numb with the misery of it all. The audience staggers out not so much empowered or enlightened as stunned into submission. The trouble with someone telling you “the way it is” (or was) is that it leaves you nothing to say in return – the communication with the audience is only one way. And so, there is no spirit of the film transcending its culturally specific dimensions and opening out into the universal. Mungiu’s film is a masterpiece but with nowhere to go.
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