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4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days/ 4 Luni, 3 Saptamini Si 2 Zile (15)
© Unknown - all rights reserved |
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| Tookey's Rating |
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3
/10 |
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| Average Rating |
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7.60
/10 |
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| Starring |
Anamaria Marinca  , Laura Vasiliu, Vlad Ivanov
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| Full Cast > |
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Directed by:
Cristian Mungiu 
Written by:
Cristian Mungiu
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| Released: |
2007 |
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| Genre: |
DRAMA
OVERRATED
FOREIGN
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| Origin: |
Romania |
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| Colour: |
C |
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| Length: |
113 |
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That’s how long it feels. |
Reviewed by Chris Tookey
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Here’s the Romanian movie which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and it’s very much the sort which usually wins such prizes: a grim, grimy, extremely low-budget film that offers an unremittingly bleak view of its home nation.
It is acted with great realism, especially by its leading actress, Anamaria Marinca (pictured), and pulls no punches in its storyline. It tells of two female room-mates at college, Otilia (Marinca) and Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), who we see preparing over an inordinately boring first half-hour for an unspecified event. This turns out to be a cheap but far from cheerful abortion for Gabita. Terminations were illegal under the Communist rule of mid-Eighties Romania, and the remaining hour and a half of the picture spares us no detail in showing us how demeaning such a process could be.
The male abortionist turns out to be a bad lot, to put it mildly, and the pregnant girl’s best friend has to live through a nightmare in order to help with the aborted foetus, which is displayed in gruesome detail. As in that other acclaimed Romanian picture, The Death of Mr Lazarescu, virtually every character seems to be uncaring, corrupt or officious.
Pro-Choice lobbyists have hailed this film as showing that legalised abortion is good, but I have my doubts. It shows us that backstreet abortion is bad, but that’s not the same thing. The picture spares no sympathy for the unborn child, a fact which strikes me as rather worse than an oversight. And it avoids filling us in on the circumstances – who the father is, what the potential mother’s circumstances are, and what the alternatives might be – to an extent that makes any informed judgment impossible. It also leaves the characters so underwritten that it’s hard to care about them as much as we probably should.
The film’s one upbeat characteristic is that it shows us the depth of Otila’s friendship with her pregnant friend, but even this is undercut by Gabita’s ingratitude. It’s as though the inhuman environment has infected even her. And there’s no attempt to examine her feelings, or lack of them, for the foetus, which is unmistakably developed enough to be recognised as a small baby.
The film’s a hard slog, and, despite the critical praise that will be lavished upon it by the usual suspects, it isn’t well made. Several shots are too dark, too static, or simply out of focus.
Writer-director Cristian Mungiu is to be commended for making such an uncompromising film with minimal resources, but I’m not sure why anyone would pay to see a picture that tells us nothing about the abortion process that we don’t know already. It’s Vera Drake without the laughs, and about as entertaining as the norovirus.
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