A film that makes a powerful argument for legalized abortion won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year. It sounds like a Fahrenheit 9/11 kind of situation, a bunch of Frenchmen rewarding the political left, but 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days is very much its own kind of film, and not one that gives NARAL anything to cheer about. Set in the 1980s in Romania, during the reign of the dictator Ceauşescu and the grim final throes of communism, the film tackles politics in a microcosm, telling a simple story about one day in the life of two girls that only hints at the political turmoil around them.
Filmed in a series of expertly planned long takes, the film follows college student Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) as she accompanies her roommate Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) to get an abortion (the film’s title refers to how far along she is in her pregnancy). Abortion has been illegal in Romania since the 1960s, so their only choice is to go to Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov), the kind of man who asks self-promoting, rhetorical questions in order to guilt or threaten people into going his way. What happens next is as surprising as it is inevitable; Gabita and Otilia live in a world of desperate people with little power, and they have been in danger from the first scene. The plot is deliberately unstructured, following a chronological order rather than a dramatic one, and the story’s unpredictability gives it a dreadful tension from the first moment.
What keeps this all riveting rather than aimless is the long takes, which mostly follow Otilia and link the audience indelibly to her state of mind. The camera, often handheld, shakes when she shakes, and freezes when she freezes; in the ocean of this unfamiliar world Otilia is the buoy, and the audience is as connected to her feelings as if she were narrating directly. Vasiliu and Ivanov too perform flawlessly during the long takes, an enormous acting challenge. We learn to read all three actors’ faces, relying on them to reveal the subtext; this is a world in which little is said and much is implied, and their smallest facial expressions and movements are keys to the film’s meaning.
The sound is nearly as stunning as the camera, closing in on running water, distant footsteps or a whispered voice in the way a human ear can, selectively hearing what’s important. Everything given an aural “close-up” is not key to the story, but the overall effect is to draw the audience further into Otilia’s head, to hear the water sloshing in her mouth as she brushes her teeth. It is also, simply, beautiful—it’s hard to imagine another film in which so much attention has been paid to sound.
Despite the clear setting within the Ceauşescu regime, and the pervasive sense of dread throughout the film, there are no real politics here—illegal abortion is simply a fact of life, as is the necessity to buy nearly everything on the black market, or to contemplate one’s future trapped in a country that is careening downhill. The menacing Mr. Bebe is the closest the film has to a dictator, and Gabita and Otilia’s futile resistance against him could be seen as a metaphor for the Romanian people. Or, maybe not. Mungiu isn’t saying, and his film is stronger for it.
This is the kind of film that ought to be written about in film class, and probably will be, given a 10-page explication of the use of handheld camera techniques. What Mungiu achieves through use of film style is the simplest use of the art form, and the most triumphant. He tells a story with a camera tilt, reveals inner thoughts with a single cut. 4 Months is filmmaking at its pared-down best.
Cristian Mungiu spoke to the assembled press following the screening of his film, and provided significant insight into a film that he said was simply a way of capturing his twenties.
Current Romanian films have a tendency to want to film the last years of the Ceauşescu regime. Why are you going back to this moment?
I can’t speak for everybody, but if you ask me I think it’s a matter of all of us, the young Romanian directors, being between 30 and 40. I think it has something to do with wanting to make a film about our youth and about our twenties more than just revisiting the period. If you notice in this film, I wanted to make sure I never pronounced the word Ceauşescu or communism. For me this is a story about my twenties. I wanted to make a relevant story for me and my generation, and not necessarily make a chronicle of the time. There’s a big different in film between what we do and what the filmmakers of the 90s did. Young directors have this desire to make a film about their twenties when they get enough distance. It just happens.
How did you find your actors, especially the two leads?
They are all trained as theater actors. Laura is just an actress from very small theaters--I met her working on commercials. I just decided that she has a good potential of being natural; she has emotion. Anamaria, she had a very strange fate. She acted in this British TV series, Sex Traffic, and she won a BAFTA. She became all of a sudden better known in England than in Romania. She decided to move to London. Unfortunately she decided to do this 2 weeks before I started the casting. She was on my list of people to see from the beginning. I got to see her last because of this. Now I think her career kind of flourishes because of this.
It’s such a beautiful about women helping each other out. Could you talk about the women in your life?
It’s more about friendship and it’s more about solidarity, and fighting when you have a common enemy. I got this story directly from the girls that have been involved, which made all the difference when I wrote this. I never thought I would make a film out of this story to start with. Last year when I was writing and trying to find a strong relevant story from my twenties, this story came again in conversation. It came with so much anger I realized it had the potential to become a good story.
Commercials require telling things very quickly and not very slowly, and you tell things very subtly and slowly in this film. How did you make that switch?
I came from writing and then I moved to filmmaking, but after I made my first [film] I discovered, I was 34 and I had to live off something. It was more difficult for me to move to commercials from filmmaking to get back now. It is something else; they are two different languages, you shouldn’t mix them. Some of the skills you have to use are similar, but the language is very, very different.
Was your strategy of using long takes something that was with your script from the beginning?
Yes. This is why I was so careful when I cast the actors. I had this idea for a long while, but if you don’t have the right actors you can’t actually do it. They have to remember 10 pages of text, in detail. Finally when I made the decisions, I not only tried to choose the right characters, but people I could trust. Mr. Bebe-- has was able to learn 10 pages of dialogue without dropping a single word of what we discussed, and delivering it the way we planned. I thought it [long takes] was worth trying, even though it’s difficult to do this. It allows the viewers to be part of the story in a very different way. There’s a strength coming from this emotion that the characters are developing in front of the camera directly.
Has the film been seen in Romania?
The film started in Romania last Friday. I hope that abortion could become maybe a bit of an issue in Romania after this film. I rather hope that it’s going to create a debate about what’s happening now. There are a lot of things to learn about the present from this film, I believe.
Is abortion legal in Romania now?
It is legal starting from 1990, one of the first measures taken by the Romanian government after the fall of Communism.
Can you talk about your use of a handheld camera?
There were two things in connection with the camera. We decided that the camera should pretty much tell the film from the perspective of the main character. We decided that the camera is going to follow her state of mind if possible. If she’s still in the film and she’s calm, the camera is still also. But if she’s nervous or tense and emotional and runs or climbs stairs, the camera will follow. It was that simple. We knew from the beginning we didn’t want to use a tripod, but we didn’t want to use a Steadicam because it’s too smooth and too nice. We never wanted it to be too shaky, but just to feel that it’s alive.
In the scene with the negotiation over the price of the abortion, is there more subtext in Romanian?
We tried to be pretty close with the translation. There are parts in the film where there are a lot of things that can’t be translated, it’s full of a lot of contextual things about the situation and the society, about those times, the way people acted, which couldn’t necessarily be translated. Maybe in Romanian you get the sense of what’s going to happen a little bit earlier, but for the first 70% of the conversation, it’s not very clear where it’s going. It’s not direct at all. It was a way of thinking in a way people really used a lot. You would not say things directly, you would see how people react. This was the kind of attitude I was trying to portray.
Since we’re looking at Anamaria’s face for so long, we begin to project ahead as to what she might look like in 10-15 years. She seems to be sliding into a stoic life of making potatoes for her boyfriend, as she says in the film. Was that your intent? Where might she be today?
I hope she’s not making potatoes for anybody. This was my point, and this is where she’s the main character, because she’s the one that understands. She’s the one who makes decisions. I doubt that the next day after the film stops, the girls would still be friends. I really can’t make any more comments. From what I know, there were two ways for people of her generation, and they either married before the fall of communism and they are making potatoes now, or they didn’t, and probably they emigrated at the beginning of the 90s. These were the common options for everyone.
Did the aesthetic of discovery or witnessing ever run into conflict with the highly scripted nature of the project?
It’s easy for me to reach this naturalness and realism by structuring. I did allow the actors to make their comments and bring in whatever they had [that was] personal, but not during the shooting. In case there were things that I liked from their proposals I kept them. The shooting itself is quite creative, because you can’t plan in advance how you’re going to shoot a film like this. I never knew in advance in detail, because it’s limiting to know from the beginning you’re going to shoot it from what take and to decide what’s important. Sometimes we had no idea at the beginning which is the best shot. We just needed to rehearse and see.
So there was no storyboarding at all?
No. I do this all the time for my regular shoots, but not for this one.
Can you talk about the choices you made in shooting your sequences?
Most of it came from this desire of just having all the scenes or most of the scenes in just one take. This was a condition from the beginning. I also knew that I never wanted to tilt or pan, just deliver this information from their world. Then I made a point that I wanted to show that the world of these characters is bigger than what I show. People are off-camera, having their heads above the shot. I started to film on purpose in the middle or at the end of a conversation. I stopped the film in the middle of a gesture and of a sound, Hopefully people would understand that this is just a slice. Their story has a lot of unanswered questions. There are a lot of things placed in the film that are illogical. It is not a classical narrative. If we watch a regular day in our lives, there are a lot of things that haven’t been solved in that day. It’s coming from film school that all the questions have to have answers in the film. It is not that way for me.
The film is wholly about sale and purchase, even from the early sequences in which people are buying black market products. It feels like an essay on economics. What does it say about the economy now?
What I try to do is never write down what my film is about before I start. If you write down your message or what the film is about, the film is going to be about that. I want to find a very complex, relevant situation, and tell it from the perspective of the characters and just focus on the story, and make sure that the story is very realistic. If I manage to respect this complexity of life in the story, the film is going to be very complex. I never tried to portray something specifically in it, or make any kind of metaphor about anything. I started making films as a reaction to those very metaphorical things, to say something very precisely but not directly. My decision-making is connected to the story. If things are likely to happen I keep them in the film. I only focus on each and every scene to be the right one following the scene before it.
Do young people today identify with the people in this film?
From responses I’ve gotten in Q&As in Romania, they don’t see it as something that really happened. They live in a very different world over there. I think the form of the film speaks to them more than the content. The content speaks for people my age or even older than me. This was the most usual comment that we got from the audience after the screenings, either ‘It’s my life told on screen,’ or ‘This is nothing in comparison to what happened to me.’ We get some very ugly stories as soon as you get out of the theater. Younger people see it as a film, it’s not about them. I hope there is something for them to understand.
Throughout the film there is a strong sense of menace. Is that part of your intent? Is it a stand-in for the regime?
I wanted to do two things with this kind of tension. The kind of aggression that you were feeling from the system was very diffuse. You could feel it from everybody having this authority on you. It’s part of the atmosphere, the way I remember it. The second part, in the last 40 minutes of the film, I wanted to make a very tense film about what could have happened, not what happened. It was all in the head of the main character. From her perspective, everything could have happened. For some other people some of these things really happened. It was important for me not to over-dramatize the story. I never wanted to make a melodrama. I wanted to point out that it’s possible, just using the means that you’re having as an art-house film, to have the tension that you have with an American thriller.
