4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days: Late term

A recent feature in the New York Times magazine heralded the dawning of a new age in Romanian cinema. Director Cristian Mungiu’s pulse-pounding drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which opens this weekend in Atlanta, confirms that something truly extraordinary is emerging from Romania. Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, 4 Months joins another recent Romanian film sensation, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, which also garnered an award at the 2005 Cannes Festival. That film followed a 63-year-old man as he reluctantly leaves his cramped apartment and enters the horrifying quagmire of the bureaucratic, often incompetent Romanian health care industry. The sense of pitiful isolation director Cristi Puiu conveyed in Mr. Lazarescu’s last hours of life stung with a brutal truth that pushed past the boundaries of Romania to enter the global film consciousness.

Films such as Mr. Lazarescu and 4 Months demonstrate the marvel of world cinema: how instantaneously borders of nation or culture can fall away when the focus is on human beings.

Mungiu’s film opens in the vast, echoing hallways of a polytechnic college dorm. There, two roommates, Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) and her best friend Otilia (Anamaria Marinca), carefully plan to procure an illegal abortion for Gabita. Though Mungiu offers a harrowing look at the brutal consequences when abortion is illegal, the film is – like Mr. Lazarescu – fundamentally a character study, about individuals trapped within a callous, bureaucratic system in which human needs are secondary to state efficiency.

The year is 1987, during the final days of Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu’s oppressive reign. Ceausescu implemented a ban on abortions in 1966, and estimates have since put the death toll from illegally sought abortions at more than 500,000. The ranks of abandoned and homeless children also testified to the social cost of Ceausescu’s reproductive policy.

Just how vicious this system is to the women trapped within it is immediately clear. Most of the details for arranging Gabita’s abortion fall to Otilia, who has taken on the potentially dangerous role of her roommate’s caretaker. To obtain the abortion there is a succession of bureaucrats to finesse and Kafkaesque hoops to jump through as well as the act’s dreadful aftermath, including disposal of the fetus and covering up the tracks of their crime.

But daily life in Romania comes with its own hardships, whether it’s the numerous black marketeers selling everything from cigarettes to Tic-Tacs or the lines wrapping around city blocks for goods or services. A young, pleading blond woman seems to bring out the sadist in many of the people Otilia encounters, suggesting the disregard for women is not limited to reproductive issues.

In some of the most frustrating moments, Otilia attempts to book a hotel room where the abortion will be performed, but her efforts are blocked by officious clerks. Things take a turn for the more patently horrifying when she meets with the briefcase-toting abortionist, Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov). A man who has found himself in a powerful position, he exploits his power to a grotesque degree. He’s not satisfied with the estimate of how far along Gabita’s pregnancy is (the four months, three weeks, two days of the title) and the line her late-term abortion represents: Anything after four months is murder in the state’s eyes. His insults and rebukes grow uglier: It’s clear either money or some other payment will have to be worked out, and the two women find themselves in an even more desperate position.

Though shot in the fly-on-the-wall fashion of the Italian neorealist cinema, 4 Months has the ratcheted-up tension of a great thriller. The film gives what some might call ordinary events genuine gravitas. But for those living through them, no drama is greater.