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4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days



Watch the trailer for "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days"

Starting out as a film buff in my teens in India, I remember buying a book on the history of the Academy Awards and committing it to memory. I had never been to America but Hollywood made me want to move there. Just a few years later, when I made Buffalo my home, it was the siren call of American movies and culture that brought me here. When I arrived, I brought that dog-eared, well-thumbed book on the Oscars with me.

Since then, my love of movies has only grown. Taken in its historical entirety, Hollywood is still my favorite cinema in the world. But moving to this country also gave me access, mostly through videotape, to films from all over the globe. It was revelatory to discover film movements and styles—like Italian neorealism, or the French films of Robert Bresson—that owed little to the ruling American model of movies. When I started attending the Toronto Film Festival, I was further stunned to find a small mountain of great films from around the world, many of them from far-flung, unlikely countries.

In the midst of all these personal discoveries and expansions, one romance has been dying a long, slow death: my foundational love of the Oscars. What I once cherished as a great and reliable index of the highest cinematic “quality” now appears to have become a self-absorbed, self-congratulatory media spectacle that, in the case of foreign language films, is both aesthetically conservative and deeply clueless.

I relate this personal story in order to present my case in point. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, from Romania, is a flat-out masterpiece and one of the very best films made anywhere last year. At the Cannes Film Festival, this tiny, unknown film won the top prize. It played at festivals all year (including Toronto), picking up nothing but praise. At the valuable Internet site, Metacritic.com, which aggregates reviews, the movie has an almost unheard-of score of 97 out of 100. And yet the Academy Awards completely passed it by, giving it not a single nomination.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

Cristian Mungiu’s film is set in Romania in 1987 during the Ceausescu regime. A college student (Gabita, played by Laura Vasiliu) wants to get an illegal abortion and is helped in her attempt by her friend and dorm roommate (Otilia, played by Anamaria Marinca). The movie follows them during a 24-hour period as they find an abortionist-from-hell and negotiate various obstacles that are part and parcel of daily life under a vast bureaucracy.

This is a savagely satirical, fiercely feminist film that can also be read as a muckraking exposé of life under Communist rule. To do this wouldn’t be wrong, but it would almost be too easy. The Romanian films of the pre-1989 Communist era were indirect and relied on veiled metaphors to smuggle ideas and criticisms under the radar. But as A.O. Scott wrote in the New York Times after a recent visit to Romania, the exciting “new wave” of filmmakers in that country is intent on overturning those oblique and symbolic ways of storytelling. They want to confront daily life head-on, display it unadorned, show it in dense and vivid detail. What they don’t want to do is merely mine it for a “message” from a cozy metaphorical distance.

And so, in this movie, Mungiu settles on a perfect style to suit his aims. Instead of the Hollywood shot/reverse shot style that keeps shots brief by cutting frequently, he films most of the scenes in single-shot long takes. By not cutting within a scene, he makes us feel the presence of time like a weight, pressing down upon these characters as they hurtle from one crisis to the next. By the end, we have a full-blown, white-knuckle thriller on our hands.

The movie makes an interesting choice: the primary character is not the flaky, psychologically opaque student getting the abortion but instead her resourceful friend. As Otilia moves about town during the day, procuring goods on the black market, bribing a hotel manager to secure a hotel room, and making secret contact with the shady abortionist, she commands our complete attention and sympathy. In a perfect world, this live-wire performance by Anamaria Marinca would have “Oscar” written all over it.

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