4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, the latest success from Romania’s growing filmmaking community, is honest and brilliantly directed. The film recently opened in D.C. after winning the Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or and garnering international praise for writer/director Cristian Mungiu’s nonjudgmental portrayal of a young woman seeking an illegal abortion with the help of a close friend.
The camera follows college student Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) with obsessive faithfulness over the course of one winter day in 1987. The day begins as Otilia and her pregnant roommate Gabita (Laura Vasiliu)shy;—who has deluded herself into thinking the day of her abortion would never really come—discuss the details of their plan. Rendered incapable of making the slightest decision or following through on her tasks, the timid Gabita leaves the decision-making to Otilia, who accepts her responsibility toward her friend with understandable frustration and admirable loyalty.
The day’s events seem commonplace—checking into a hotel, meeting the doctor who will perform the procedure, having dinner with a boyfriend’s family—but their triviality is masked by the sensation that every moment drags the characters deeper into the consequences of their decisions. When Dr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov) tells the girls that after the abortion begins, they will not be able to turn back, his statement embodies the film’s tense acceptance of the difficult things people do to get by.
Mungiu’s brilliant decision to follow only Otilia creates long, uncomfortable shots, illustrating the characters’ inability to verbalize their emotion. The on-screen reality is challenging to confront, but beautiful to watch. In one quietly frightening scene, Otilia walks from a train station to the hotel in the dark, and the camera stays just over her shoulder as she reacts to the piercing sounds of the night—even a trash can lid sounds menacing, a sensation that any woman who has walked alone in the dark can relate to.
4 Months has been discussed in the context of recent American films like Juno and Knocked Up that quickly skim over the abortion issue in the event of unplanned pregnancies, but this thematic connection is the only link between the movies. While 4 Months is full of realistic and sometimes humorous dialogue, it is far from a comedy.
Although its plot centers around an abortion, 4 Months commendably chooses not to take a moral stand. Mungiu makes it clear that under the harsh rule of Nicolae Ceauşescu birth control and condoms were nonexistent at worst and extremely costly at best, with coitus interruptus the most common and frequently unsuccessful method of avoiding pregnancy. A girl selling black market items in Otilia and Gabita’s dorm has one pack of birth-control pills; when the other girls comment on the extremely high price, the seller explains that she can charge an exorbitant amount with such high demand in the coed dorm.
The scenes of an illegal and dangerous procedure performed in a hotel room on desperate young people are reminiscent of Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things, in which London’s poorest working class immigrants consider selling their kidneys in exchange for a passport, but Mungiu keeps the viewer aware that this film’s procedure involves a fetus, which is much less easily forgotten.
Just as every movie about drug trafficking or prostitution need not assert itself as anti-drugs or pro-prostitution, Mungiu has created a film that includes abortion as part of one woman’s life, without having to either demonize it or proclaim it as free from moral problems. 4 Months confronts one of the issues that plagued Soviet women in a realistic and meaningful way, adding a significant voice to the conversation about abortion through a gripping film about the deep commitment of friendship.
