After 2005’s Moartea domnului Lazarescu (The Death of Mr Lazarescu), another very high-quality Romanian film explores the country’s ills and the illnesses of its inhabitants in the 2007 Cannes Competition entry 4 luni, 3 saptamini si 2 zile (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days). Director Cristian Mungiu set his tale of a very late abortion in 1987 and uses an unobtrusive yet utterly filmic style that mixes the handheld dogme aesthetic with beautiful static shots to great effect. Though the film takes some time to get going and could use some trimming, it might find a place in arthouses across the continent.

 

Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) and Gabita (Laura Visiliu) are two friends at the same polytechnic who are desperately looking for a hotel room in town. They intend to take Mr Bébé there, who will help Gabita with a small problem: she is pregnant and does not want to keep the baby. Mr Bébé is no saintly Vera Drake, however, and he demands a proper payment for the actions he will perform, since they could land him in jail for several years. As uncomfortable as the final form of payment is for the girls, Mungiu makes it ten times worse for the audience, using an excruciatingly precise combination of mise-en-scène and actor choreography that will leave no one untouched.

In the film’s opening shot, goldfish swim around in their aquarium and a cigarette fumes in an ashtray on a small table but no person is in sight. They are there, however, still hidden from the viewer until the camera travels backwards to reveal first one person to the left and then another to the right. It is typical of the way in which Mungiu lets his story unfold in a controlled visual environment that juxtaposes off-screen and on-screen and is a cunning visual representation of the idea that many things are hidden in plain sight, such as the illegal abortions during the communist regime. Abortion in 1987 Romania is not so much a moral issue as it is yet another thing that needs to be hidden from the inquisitive eyes of the government.

 

The film’s first forty minutes are sly about what the girls are organising, why they need the hotel room and what exactly Mr Bébé (note the name) will be doing. Since it is unlikely that anyone who will see the film will be unaware of its subject (not to mention that the title is a giveaway), this seems unnecessary and it needlessly slows down the story since Mungiu needs to manoeuvre into unlikely places to keep the central theme hidden from the viewer.

 

The two main actresses as well as Vlad Ivanov, who portrays Mr Bébé, are in fine form, and Marinca especially is very effective in her numerous close-ups. Cinematography by Oleg Mutu (who also shot Lazarescu) is excellent, using faded blues and greens as the only colour smudges in an otherwise grey environment. His long takes that often encapsulate the entire scene are used to powerful effect, most notably during the actual abortion procedure and a clever juxtaposition of two scenes set at the house of Otilia’s boyfriend: the first a large birthday dinner scene that somehow encapsulates all the ills of Romanian society in innocent-sounding table chatter and the second the following scene in which Otilia confronts her boyfriend in the quiet darkness of his bedroom.

 

The film is the first in an ironically titled series of films called Tales from the Golden Age. 

 

 

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