4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007, Cristian Mungiu)

Holy intense movie, gave me a major headache. Or maybe that was dehydration. Very good cast (IMDB links them all to the other 3-4 Romanian movies I’ve heard of). Some nice looong takes. Awesome dinner table scene plays out in a single take with just a ton of dialogue, mounting tension from both onscreen and off. An impressive movie for sure, glad I saw it.

NPR gives some background:

In 1966, Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceausescu sought to boost his nation’s population by criminalizing abortion, declaring, “The fetus is the property of the entire society… anyone who avoids having children is a deserter who abandons the laws of national continuity.” 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a new film by director Cristian Mungiu, explores the ramifications of Ceausescu’s ban two decades later. … Mungiu won’t go into personal details but says his film is based on the experience of someone he knows. He says half a million women died getting illegal abortions during the reign of [Ceausescu].

Practically a horror movie, in fact it builds tension and suspense better than almost any horror movie I’ve seen. Almost lands in the Lars Von Trier / Gaspar Noe camp of terrifying movies that you feel worse for having watched and never want to watch again… but not quite. Stays on the Michael Haneke side of the fence with the movies that make you feel upset but interested. I mean, it has a happy ending, I’m not saying it’s Last House on the Left. The horror isn’t from having evil characters (the abortionist is the worst of the bunch), and their behavior (unlike most by Haneke, Noe, Trier) isn’t just movie-believable, it’s completely convincing. These are real people in a tense situation in a totalitarian state, in the same situation that many Americans would be in if abortion was illegalized.

A rarity in this movie: a weapon (the switchblade) picked up but never used.

Reverse Shot makes the point that this is not simply “the Romanian abortion movie,” in part because “Otilia [the blonde woman] — and not Gabita — occupies the film’s narrative and moral center.” Instead they call it “a tense, riveting thriller (of a sort) that subtly evokes the experiences of women in a society that fiercely regulates their lives and bodies, often reducing them to commodities to be bought, sold, and bartered, no different at the extreme from the Kent cigarettes and orange Tic Tacs traded on the Bucharest black market.”

From an interview with the director:

Whenever you have to live in a period that is complicated, you have to learn your way. Nothing is very clear or simple or on the surface. You have to understand how things [work]. This kind of generates the feeling of negotiation. It’s difficult to say, by the end of the film, which of these two girls is better served by this society: the girl who apparently makes the decisions and negotiates with everybody, or the girl who doesn’t seem to do much, but will have her problem solved by the end of the day. It was a way of talking about compromise. When you live in a closed society and don’t expect this society will come to an end — people never thought the communist system would end — you tend to compromise more. They don’t anticipate any kind of judgment. They naturally think, “This system is abusing all the time, so I can be abusing with some other people because of this.”

The beginning of the film [is about] the ability to find your way over there by compromising and negotiating your way out of things. There’s another scene which is related to this — the dinner scene where you see a different generation of people who are not guilty of anything else but adapting to the system. They had to survive, they had to raise children. They are people who adapt to that society. For me it’s the meaning of all these objects. It’s about what it meant [to have] that symbol of a free world: bar soap, a pack of cigarettes. They represented much more than you can see.