Cast: Anamaria Marinca, Laura Vasiliu

Director: Cristian Mungiu

Screenplay: Cristian Mungiu

Running time: 1 hrs 53 mins

Genre: Drama/Foreign Film



CRITIQUE:


The year is 1987. The Communist regime of Ceausescu is still gripping Romania like an iron fist. Two roommates check into a nondescript hotel room in Bucharest. It is in this room we realise the state of things. 4 Weeks, 3 Months and 2 Days is a film about abortion, hence the title, and if it wasn’t so clever, it would directly locate us to its time and place at the onset. Instead we decipher details as the film charts the ordeal of a college student Otilia throughout what seems to be another day of banality from her dormitory to the streets of Bucharest. Until she finally got hold of a room, along with her friend Gabita and a mysterious man named Bebe, the dangerous situation is made clear. And it is a harrowing one. Ironically, it is within this four-walled hotel room that the entire score of the situation is drawn: 4 Weeks is not only an abortion movie, but also a politically-hued, humanist masterwork, told in a way that eschews telling and moralising and rather lays bare to its audience the heart of the matter.


The tale is deliberately distanced from the very subject of abortion, the pregnant Gabita, and instead focused the point-of-view on the friend Otilia, whose conflicted and suppressed emotions give the story its stunning complexity. Otilia is clearly world-wise and more level-headed than Gabita, a gallingly naive, self-centred and insensitive undergraduate, and the interplay of these two characters present the conundrum: if the entire situation be reversed, would Gabita go through the same lengths for her Otilia? The latter is losing certainty and throughout the rest of the film, we witness an exceptional mixture of horror, anger, sympathy, doubt and weariness of the society she exists in, all subtly composed in the face of Anamaria Marinca. This is an extraordinary performance. Watch the excellently staged dinner scene where Otilia tries to swallow her anxiety and rage to attend her boyfriend’s mother’s birthday party. Shot in an unbroken long take, the result is persistently convincing and real, Otilia’s face palpably showing the strain of the day’s events.


Director Cristian Mungiu uncompromisingly composes his shots with less cuts as possible, following almost a real-time chronology, something that intensifies its documentary feel. Hand-held shots frame the backstreets of Bucharest, dread filling the dark, noirish corners of this city, and the unflinching power of close-ups captures the every minutia of emotions on the actors’ faces. See that static shot of Marinca after the abortion ordeal with abortionist Bebe, the effect is tense and deeply unsettling and claustrophobic.


VERDICT:

Calling this as merely an abortion movie is almost like an insult to Mungiu’s disquieting work of art. This is a cleverly pitched, shot, directed and acted film – one that glimpses on a very real and human nightmare.



RATING: A+