4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
Review: Winner of the 2007 Palme D’Or at Cannes (and upsetting the favoured Coen Bros. film No Country for Old Men) was the Romanian movie 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days about two female flatmates, university students during the Communist regime of dictator Ceausescu in 1987. Under this dictator’s rule, abortion warranted the death penalty. It is the need to be careful, the danger and the inability to choose which thus underpins these two women’s struggle when one of them becomes pregnant and seeks an illegal abortion, her roommate going to great lengths to procure one for her in a run-down hotel room with a male abortionist whom they are not sure they can trust. A grim social determinism hangs over this film, one of a number to address social concerns in the Ceausescu era. Minimalist in conception, this film comprises a series of individual shots, one shot per dramatic set-up, discreetly edited and with functional but attention-getting camera movement. Brooding, contemplative and naturalistically acted 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days creates an engrossing and detailed slice of social realism in the manner beloved of East European cinema. Day to day life and associated behaviour is the order of the day here and the film is unadorned by fanciful detail, even shorn of a music score in favour of the natural sounds of Romanian city and university dormitory life. But, it is the dramatic intensity of the illegal abortion process which makes this exceptionally acted film so dramatically intense. "Brooding, contemplative and naturalistically acted 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days creates an engrossing and detailed slice of social realism in the manner beloved of East European cinema" Observational rather than interpretive, the film fully details the social circumstances which result in the dread accompanying the need to secure an illegal abortion. While the pregnant roommate remains passive, her friend takes most of the risks: finding a hotel room, meeting the abortionist and setting up the procedure. Indeed, the solidarity between these two women and the altruism of the non-pregnant friend speaks to a humane ideal of the need for humanist co-operation in the face of ideologically based social oppression, the bleakly realistic details of life under a Communist regime evident in the grey, wintry textures and desolate routine of life in this part of the world at this time in its history. Yet amidst this harrowing social portrait are clever characterizations of those Romanian people who defied the oppression of the regime and risked their lives and livelihood to guarantee what much of the free world was beginning to recognize as a woman’s right to choose – the right to abortion – although for perhaps suspect reasons (which are never questioned). It is the unsaid moral issue which underlies the socio-political context here, although this film does not concern itself with morality and leaves the question of basic human rights simmering in the gloomy background. Although the central issue may be a woman’s right to abortion, the reality of securing one in such circumstances makes for a cruel necessity – the abortionist will do it for the money and to secure trust between strangers facing prison terms for murder and get the money these women have to go to harrowing lengths of discussion, the pregnant girl especially having to draw on an inner resolve which defies her mousy nature. The severity of lives here combined with the harsh, dreadful reality of circumstance gives the film a stark immediacy in the mid-section involving the abortionist, one of the most powerfully dramatic and brilliantly (if minimalist) sustained sequences to emerge from recent Eastern European cinema, as vividly realistic a depiction of the illegal abortion process as attempted in world cinema. Outstanding.
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