Oppressed and Depressing

Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, which launched Romania’s so-called new wave, was visually confined and cramped—a portrait of a dying man filmed mostly in ambulances and hospitals and set over the course of just a few hours. Remarkably, Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or-winning 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is even narrower in scope. Like Puiu, Mungiu can neither step out of his entrenched human perspective nor look away, but unlike Lazarescu, 4 Months is also trapped in its era. The title card, “Romania, 1987,” grounds the film in the imposed intimacy of Romania’s brutal Communist regime, the quiet terror of which drowns every frame in fear and uncertainty.

Gabriela (Laura Vasiliu) is a frightened college student who desperately needs an abortion and relies on her roommate, Otilia (Anamaria Marinca), for help obtaining it. In the first third of the film, Otilia is persistent and confrontational because Gabriela is simply too scared, and the latter’s lies of convenience instantly turn the abortionist, Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov), against the pair. This leads to a sickening deal between the self-satisfied man who knows he is needed and the desperate young women who have no alternative.

In the scenes that make up the movie’s centerpiece, Mungiu presents Gabriela’s abortion in stark, unmoving tableaux. As the scared, half-naked girl lies in the middle of a bed in a shabby hotel room, we witness an unadorned confrontation with a terrifying fate. The result is deeply unsettling, as are the handheld pans of gray, chaotic intersections and courtyards, which slowly reveal huddling women standing in bread lines and children playing a cautious game of soccer.

Indeed, Mungiu’s modest set pieces and subtle juxtapositions create the perfect background for a dramatic thriller. Early in the film, the shock of a mid-game soccer ball’s collision with a windshield suggests that 4 Months aspires to more than social realism, and with the exception of a superfluous (though only by this film’s minimalist standards) red herring in the last third, the suspense is elegant and steady, emerging organically from the intimate drama.

Above all, though, it is a deeply human film grounded in an oppressive political reality which forces itself onto every interaction, and the result is constant suspicion and a complete absence of privacy. In 4 Months, doors are suddenly opened and prying questions are always asked. When nothing but a locked door and evasive answers lie between the young women and the regime’s brutal, moralistic punishment, the stakes are extremely high.

Mungiu is at his most insightful when he films the girls’ response to this inevitable conclusion. Before the abortion, Gabriela locks herself in the hotel room’s bathroom and turns on the faucet to avoid confronting Otilia’s unthinkable sacrifice. Later, when Otilia staggers into her boyfriend’s bathroom and turns on the sink, she is too realistic to imagine that she can hide from the world around her and yet what she wants also seems unattainable: a moment to herself. 4 Months’ brilliant final shot suggests that in “Romania, 1987,” it is this luxury—rather than contraband goods or the abortion itself—that remains truly elusive.