NYFF: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

By Katey Rich

Like Blade Runner, a fellow film selected for the New York Film Festival, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days depicts a bleak world with little color, serious governmental control and no hope for the future. Unlike Ridley Scott, though, Cristian Mungiu is telling his story in a world that already existed: Romania in the 1980s, in the final days of Communism and the brutal dictatorship of Nicolai Ceausescu. His Palme d'Or-winning film follows one harrowing day in the lives of two college students: Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), who must get an illegal abortion, and her roommate Otilia (Anamaria Marinca), who makes huge sacrifices to help her desperate friend.

It feels wrong to review a film like 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days in anything less than ten pages. It's so richly detailed, so full of technical skill and brilliant performances, insight and political wisdom, it's the kind of film I would have written film papers about back in college, and it will almost definitely be written about in the future. Plenty of other critics have weighed in on the film's merits (it currently has a 100% rating at Rotten Tomatoes), but perhaps the most important 2 cents I can throw in is this: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, yes, has subtitles, and yes, it deals with dark issues, and yes, it uses a series of long takes to tell its story, but it is not boring. As Mungiu said himself in the press conference following the film's screening, "I wanted to point out that it's possible, just using the means [of] an art-house film, to have the tension that you have with an American thriller."

Anamaria Marinca as Otilia.

After directing commercials for several years, Mungiu returned to features intending to tell a story about his twenties, during the Ceausescu regime. "I got this story directly from the girls that have been involved, which made all the difference when I wrote this. I never thought I would make a film out of this story to start with. Last year when I was writing and trying to find a strong relevant story from my twenties, this story came again in conversation. It came with so much anger, I realized it had the potential to become a good story."

Though the film is set in one of the most controversial and dismal periods in Romanian history, Mungiu deliberately set out not to make a political film--as he points out, the words "Ceausescu" and "communism" are never mentioned. "What I try to do is never write down what my film is about before I start. If you write down your message or what the film is about, the film is going to be about that," he explained. "I never tried to portray something specifically in it, or make any kind of metaphor about anything. I started making films as a reaction to those very metaphorical things, to say something very precisely but not directly."

The closest the film comes to a stand-in for Communism is the menacing Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov), the abortionist who bullies and shames Gabita and Otilia both into paying an enormous, personal price for the abortion. Each of the girls is powerless over him in her own way; though Otilia is more aware of the situation than her friend, and resists Mr. Bebe's demands, in the end she has no choice. She faces similar choices regarding her future; before the fall of Communism it was nearly impossible to leave Romania, and though Otilia tells her boyfriend she does not want to spend the rest of her life peeling potatoes for him, there is likely no other option.

Mungiu employs extensive long takes to tell his harsh story, filming many of his scenes in a single take. He and director of photography Oleg Mutu worked together to plan scenes, though Mungiu insisted there was no storyboarding. "I never knew in advance in detail, because it's limiting to know from the beginning you're going to shoot it from what take and to decide what's important. Sometimes we had no idea at the beginning which is the best shot. We just needed to rehearse and see."

Marinca as Otilia and Vasiliu as Gabita.

The long takes also provided a challenge for the actors, who would be required to memorize up to ten minutes of dialogue at a time. Mungiu said this demand made casting difficult, but worth it in the end. "I not only tried to choose the right characters, but people I could trust. I thought it [long takes] was worth trying, even though it's difficult to do this. It allows the viewers to be part of the story in a very different way. There's a strength coming from this emotion that the characters are developing in front of the camera directly."

That strength of feeling is what makes 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days much more than an exercise in long takes, the kind of film seen by film students and no one else. Each actor powerfully brings the audience into the action, working in tandem with the camera to create an uncannily deep connection on the screen. The narrative is deliberately rambling--"It's coming from film school that all the questions have to have answers in the film," Mungiu said. "It is not that way for me." What it lacks in dramatic closure, though, it makes up in emotional impact; at its heart, this is a simple slice-of-life story, but rarely has an idea so simple been so compelling.