After winning the coveted Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, which these days is easily worth more than the Best Foreign Film Oscar this film is not being nominated for, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days exemplifies why there’s a certain limitedness to the Oscars. This film is not sweeping nor impressive, not structurally sound nor visually grabbing. It doesn’t even make bold statements. It’s just not an Oscar kind of film. It’s small, it’s mundane, and it’s very raw. Yet its impact leaves a crater. It’s simply intimate, with spectacular acting and frighteningly believable scenes.
Set in 1987, towards the end of Romania’s communist reign, college student Otilia scrambles to help her roommate Gabita set up an abortion. However, as the practice was illegal at the time, they go through back channels, and end up with a less than desirable abortionist. The film takes place during the course of one day—It throws you into the preparation right away, and ends without showing the further consequence of the abortion. It doesn’t need to.
This film posits that when thrown into a life-altering situation like the one these two women are facing, nothing else matters. Not before, and not after. It’s all about the urgency of what they’re facing and how that moment stretches. Rather than expand its scope, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is full of prolonged scenes that suck you into its reality and then imprisons you there. When a shaken Otilia is trapped in a birthday party she doesn’t want to be in—both due to her state of mind and the annoying tripe the elitist dinner guests are discussing—the camera stays fixed, filming the entire dinner conversation in full and excruciating length. We look straight at an immobile Otilia, hoping for her to get up or do something to stop this incredibly boring scene, but she never does. At that point, it becomes abundantly clear how helpless she is.
Likewise, the politics of the issue is an afterthought. Pro-life or pro-choice, the argument feels like a distraction in what little space these women have. When you’re terrified out of your wits, there’s no time to argue what’s socially acceptable—you just chase the most logical solution you can think of. The film concerns itself only with the harrowing details of what Otilia and Gabita have to endure to reach that solution, and not the implications. Still, it’s impossible to present a hard topic like abortion without giving something in return. Today, abortions are legal in Romania, and in fact they have a surprisingly large percentage of it, with almost half of the nation’s pregnancies ending in terminations. Is 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days a response to such alarming numbers? It’s all good and well to support a woman’s choice, but maybe a smarter choice would be to prevent the unwanted pregnancy in the first place. In a scene where Otilia confronts her boyfriend with a “what if” scenario of her getting pregnant, the boyfriend is so sure that it won’t happen, so it doesn’t have to be talked about—even though Otilia points out that he didn’t care about being cautious the last time they had sex. Communist regime or no communist regime, the problem remains the same.
What the film brilliantly portrays is how naïve the youth are in facing this issue, taking the matter too lightly. Throughout the story, Otilia and Gabita continually make mistakes and think that they can somehow skirt around with quick fixes and small lies—which end up exploding in their faces.
Otilia is shown to be comfortable breezing through the black market world. Early in the film, we see her purchase illegal products, and because of that familiarity she underestimates the severity of a black market abortion. The tragedy of the story is, had they stress precautions and prepare themselves more thoroughly, they wouldn’t have to end up in a pool of their own mess. One of the most graphic scenes in the movie is a lingering, in-your-face close-up of the aborted fetus. Admittedly, included purely for shock value, but shock should be the appropriate response to a situation like this. This film smacks the privileged with the reality of dealing with problems in limited conditions. While it is a movie dealing with abortion, it’s a movie about anything, really, that is taken for granted.
In the final moments of the film, Otilia and Gabita form a pact to forget the whole ordeal. Sadly, it is painfully transparent that neither of them—nor us, the audience—can wipe off the experience that easily.
"4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" opens January 25, 2008 and is rated R. Drama. Written and directed by Cristian Mungiu. Starring Anamaria Marinca, Laura Vasillu, Vlad Ivanov.
