Last year, American multiplexes were inundated with strong, capable, unexpectedly pregnant women who had made up their minds: They were keeping their babies, ooo, ohh. But at least the potential mothers of Waitress, Knocked Up and Juno had a choice. Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), one of the two Romanian women at the center of Cristian Mungiu's gripping 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which won the top prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, desperately wants to abort her fetus, which, per the title, is already halfway through the gestation process. But the film is set in 1987, at the end of the Ceausescu era, when abortion was illegal and scarcity was the norm in every aspect of citizens' harried lives. With the help of her much more capable roommate, Otilia (the astonishing Anamaria Marinca), Gabita secures an appointment with the sinister-looking Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov), an unlicensed "physician" who resembles Vera Drake in no way, shape or form. Trouble is, Mr. Bebe wants more money for his services than Otilia and Gabita are able to scrape together. But perhaps something could be arranged. . .
Following on the heels of Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, 4 Months (etc.) has been declared the crest of a Romanian new wave. Both films were shot in patient, lengthy single takes by ace cinematographer Oleg Mutu, and both are closely observed exercises in painstaking naturalism. But while Mungiu shares his countryman's wryly disgusted take on bureaucratic insensitivity, this nonstop anxiety-fest could never be mistaken, as Lazarescu frequently was, for black comedy. From its opening frames, the film casually immerses us in a world of universal deprivation, following Otilia as she roams her dormitory hall in search of black-market soap and cigarettes; from there, events unfold methodically in near-real time, culminating in the harrowing hotel-room rendezvous with Mr. Bebe and a singularly nervewracking detour in which Otilia makes a token appearance at her boyfriend's mother's birthday party. Negotiation and solidarity are the twin subjects of this quietly impressive docudrama, and Mungiu's commitment to verisimilitude is so scrupulous that he deliberately introduces the equivalent of Chekhov's famed gun without the slightest intention of providing a final-act payoff. Lazarescu troubled me because the title character seemed a mere victim of institutional indifference.
Mungiu's film, by contrast, is all about agency — which is to say, about choice. — Mike D'Angelo
