It won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival last year, but was left off the list of Oscar contenders for the best foreign language film prize this year. That combination is a pretty good indicator that a foreign film is worth seeing, and “Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days” is indeed a powerful experience.
It comes from Romania, a country that is enjoying a filmmaking renaissance of late. Like the recent “Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” this movie tracks a day of medical woes in painstaking detail.
The film is set in Bucharest in 1987, thus while the Communist Ceausescu regime was still in place. Abortion is illegal, and a woman, Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), has arranged for an abortion in a hotel room.
But this isn’t really her story; we stay with her friend, Otilia (the superb Anamaria Marinca), who is helping Gabita. The story unfolds in long, slow pieces, which often happen in unbroken camera takes in real time.
This might sound like a clinical approach, but it has the strange effect of increasing the tension and the feeling of being a helpless observer. At every level in the film’s world, the system is broken, and it’s up to Otilia to deal with the endless levels of unfairness within that system.
The opening sequences are a comedy of frustration: Every transaction is based on trade, bribery and flattery. Later, the body itself becomes a kind of transaction.
Director Christian Mungiu only occasionally uses high drama to intrude on this desperate day, notably in the scenes where the back-alley doctor (Vlad Ivanov) threatens the two women.
You will need patience to stick with Mungiu’s style. For instance, when Otilia must leave her friend and sit through a dinner with her boyfriend’s family, the camera simply locks itself next to the table and lets the scene play through. Suspense and frustration mingle, and that feeling of being trapped in exactly the wrong place without being able to get away is uncanny.
Mungiu bills this movie as the first part of a series called “Tales from the Golden Age,” a presumably tongue-in-cheek description of the Communist era. It should be an important series — maybe the Oscars will pay attention.
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