4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days is a stunning document about Romania during the last years of communism in that country.
This is one of the year's very best movies, provided you don't mind a sort of horrible depression hangover that keeps the film in your thoughts long after you've left the theatre.
4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days is set in the 1980s and concerns two young women who must engage in an illegal activity. Otilia and Gabita are roommates at university in a small town in Romania; Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) is pregnant, and Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) is going to help her get an abortion.
As abortion was outlawed in Romania in 1966, the women face very real risks. Otilia could be left sterile -- or dead -- if anything goes wrong with the abortion itself. If caught, the women could also go to prison, along with whomever performs the abortion.
(Historical digression: President Nicolae Ceaucescu outlawed abortion and contraception in Romania, a gesture that by 1989 -- the end of communism -- left an estimated 500,000 women dead from illegal abortions and 200,000 children in orphanages.)
Statistics aside, 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days is a snapshot of everyday life for Otilia and Gabita, and it's not a pretty picture. Against an unremittingly ugly and desolate landscape, the women go about the minutiae of everyday life. They scrounge up soap, cigarettes, powdered milk. Everyone in their college dorm seems to have something to sell or barter.
Then there's the seemingly simple task of booking a hotel room for the abortion. In the midst of informants, endless suspicion and widespread corruption, getting a room is a nightmare undertaking that Otilia finally achieves with a skilled combination of begging and bribery. Otilia also goes to meet the abortionist, the dreaded Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov), even though it's Gabita who seeks the procedure. It is Otilia who takes care of every detail, and her emotional responses tell the story here.
And what a story. 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days is a film stripped bare of any pretense or extraneous detail. The world Otilia and Gabita live in is drab and generally terrifying, and the most mundane events are soaked in menace and despair.
That's regular life for them.
Subject matter notwithstanding, this is not a film about abortion. 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, which won the Palme D'Or at Cannes this year, is the first film in a larger project called Tales From The Golden Age. The films in that series will offer a history of Romania during communist rule, as told through the lives of the people.
4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days is in Romanian with English subtitles. It's Romania's Official Submission in the Best Foreign Language Film Category of the 80th Annual Academy Awards, to be held in 2008.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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