Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Mother's
Dark Night of the Soul
(4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, 4/14/08)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Ideological
enemies will read it in different ways, but few can deny that Cristian
Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is powerful stuff. Typically,
American movies won't touch the abortion debate with a ten-foot pole—the
whole issue is strikingly downplayed in hits like Knocked-Up
and Juno. We therefore must turn to an import from eastern Europe,
made on a micro-budget, to portray what's already going on among thousands
of Hollywood's core customers. Make sense?
Writer-director Mungiu has delivered
a harrowing vision of what, in the usual language of the debate, is
glossed as a "back-alley" procedure. The tale is told over
a day and night in communist Romania, circa 1987. College student Otilia
(Anamaria Marinca) helps her roommate Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) through
the preparations, act, and aftermath of procuring an illegal abortion.
The women must plan the deed like a prison-break: a hotel room is reserved,
supplies prepared, an outside accomplice contacted. Scoring imported
cigarettes for bribes seems to take up an inordinate amount of time
and effort.
Otilia doesn't just do her friend
a "solid"—she's a rock. As the default mode in Ceaucescu's
Romania seems to be a kind of disparaging officiousness, she must deal
with hostile desk clerks, condescending cops, and a sleazy abortionist
(Vlad Ivanov) who's most interested in the sexual favors he can extort
from his clients. Typical for her time and place, Otilia survives by
becoming a gifted liar. Her vulnerability, though, is never far below
the surface, especially as she contemplates facing a similar dilemma
with her clueless boyfriend (Alexandru Potocean).
4 Months is a film about
as serious as cancer. Mungiu knows how to put his audience through a
wringer, and doesn't seem interested in those small cracks of humor
those sustain most real people in desperate times. Visually, the whole
thing is bathed in a blue-green fluorescent glow that seems to consume
warm colors. Nor does Mungiu avert his gaze from difficult images. No
matter what side you're on in the political debate, the spectacle of
a shoestring abortion unfolding in real time—even a fictional one—is
a difficult thing to watch. Most would probably agree it should be.
This ambivalence is perhaps the
most frustrating aspect of the film, and its bravest. If I were asked
to pick a program of films on this issue for a high school health class,
it wouldn't be a list of dueling pro-life, pro-choice screeds. Mungiu's
film alone would be enough.
None of which will prevent partisans
from interpreting 4 Months in their own ways. In a place like
Ithaca, the message seems obvious: it is the very illegality of reproductive
choice, whether in Bucharest or Baton Rouge, that makes back alley ordeals
like Otilia and Gabita's inevitable. But so-called "pro-lifers"
could put their own ideological frame around it. Despite Romania's prohibitions
against abortion, its "godless" materialism espoused a disregard
for the sanctity of life that began in the womb and ended in the grave.
It was that larger war on human dignity, they'd say, that saddled women
with such monstrous choices.
To be sure, this is not how this
writer prefers to take Mungiu's film. But watching his characters endure
their monochrome world, running a gauntlet of self-absorbed elders and
bureaucratic sourpusses, the thought is hard to resist: it wasn't just
some fetuses that were unwanted in communist Romania.
©2008 Nicholas Nicastro
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