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Review of the KFS May feature 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days Reviewed
by Mick LaSalle First, this movie should be enjoyed. Later, marveled at. And then, once the excitement has faded, "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" really should be studied, because director Cristian Mungiu creates scenes unlike any ever filmed. Moreover, he builds and reinforces a mood with unexpected techniques that are simple, personal and resoundingly effective. They are effective from the movie's opening moments. This Romanian film, set in the communist era, re-creates the crushing sense of living under totalitarianism, but it doesn't accomplish this in the usual way. There are no suffocating close-ups and no ominous music on the soundtrack. Instead, individual shots are long and leisurely. The camera movement flows, following the characters as they move about their world. Gradually, this lived-in feeling allows us to inhabit their world, too, and with that comes, not just an understanding but an actual feel for what it must have been like. Here, tyranny is not something new, but something old and endless. And so we come to understand the daily, soul-killing monotony of living under oppression. "Four Months, Three Weeks and
Two Days" is a
masterpiece. Curiously, this begins to become apparent within minutes,
even
though nothing earthshaking is happening. We see two young women
planning to go
away for a few days. They don't seem happy about it. Then one of the
women -
Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) - walks out into a hallway, and we realize
this is a
college dormitory. She knocks on a door and bargains with a fellow
student for
black market goods - cigarettes, personal items, candy. This is What becomes apparent, even before we intellectually register it, is something specific and special about the director. And though the notion is hard to explain and as mysterious as talent itself, it's worth the clumsy effort to put it into words: Mungiu is that rare director who feels in pictures. That is, he's someone whose emotions have an immediate visual analogue. I don't get the impression he pounds his head against the floor trying to find the right way to render a tone or mood. My guess is that he feels it and sees it simultaneously - and then he shows it, and we get it. Because what he sees is different from other directors, he is able to show things in new ways that are right and illuminating. Here's one quietly astounding moment: Otilia is at a party at her boyfriend's parent's house, sitting at a dinner table with people his parents' age. Her mind is elsewhere. She is worried. If things go wrong in the next few hours, her life could be ruined. But in the meantime, she can only sit, as people around her carry on a vigorous but, for her purposes, irrelevant conversation. Mungiu places her at the center of the frame and shows her in a long, long take, as the conversation happens around her. This is an aspect of consciousness, a moment in life, that we've all experienced. We've all been scared and feeling outside the general mirth. At different times, we've all been young, surrounded by older people whose lives have seemed to exist on a different planet, one safe and complacent. Yet I've never seen this reality conveyed in a movie. The scene is unbearably tense, not because Mungiu shows us that Otilia is tense, but rather because he puts us at the table with her, and he does so long enough that we soon feel what she is feeling. That's just one scene. Several
paragraphs could be written
about every scene in this film. Virtually every shot has something
novel about
it, either in its technique, emotional weight, psychological perception
or
combinations of all three. The title refers to the length of time that
Otilia's
roommate has been pregnant, and the movie follows Otilia's efforts to
secure an
abortion for her, at a time when abortion was illegal and severely
punished in Otilia is just trying to live her life, trying to be a good friend, but everything, not only the government but even the friend she's trying to help, makes things difficult for her. Marinca, at the center of the action, her face the movie's locus of meaning, is remarkable, humble in aspect but brave and focused. As the friend Gabita, Laura Vasiliu is quite different, vacuous and self-pitying. Vasiliu's achievement is that she neither asks audience sympathy nor paints Gabita in negative terms. Vlad Ivanov completes a trio of notable performances, playing the abortionist with a reasonable-seeming wickedness reminiscent of the late J.T. Walsh. Somehow "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" wasn't
nominated for a foreign language film Academy Award. Having not seen
the five
nominated films, I can't comment on them, but if they're all better
than this
one, then 2007 was the greatest year for foreign cinema in recent
decades. As
it stands, "4 Months" is the strongest foreign language film to play
this area since the one-two punch of "The Lives of Others" and
"After the Wedding" early last year. I just hope I did justice to it. For additional reviews of "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days", please click here.
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