Very few American (or Canadian) films tell you much about how the world works. You could spend an entire year in the neighbourhood multiplex, and come out 12 months later with almost no concept of how people make a living, the duties that working at a particular job entails, how the political system operates, how laws are enforced, how any piece of machinery is put together, how to build something, how to make love, how babies are born. Maybe you could go to the movies and learn how to dance or fire a gun, but the kind of movies with dancers and assassins as heroes tend to be edited so chaotically that they don’t wind up being very educational.
Perhaps one of the reasons that some of the recent films coming out of Romania—in particular 2006’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and the new drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days—have gotten such enormous critical acclaim is their refreshing focus on process. These are very patient movies, movies that take the time to show you every grim, tedious step of a complicated bureaucratic procedure (getting admitted to a hospital in Lazarescu, procuring an illegal abortion in 4 Months): making appointments, having to find somewhere else to go when the original appointment falls through, filling out paperwork, begging favours from petty authority figures—some of them merely obstreperous, others downright malevolent. Your reward for sitting through all this is, I think, a deeper understanding of the mechanics of repression. Repression and bureaucracy aren’t abstract ideas in these Romanian films; they’re concepts as real and tangible as a dingy hotel room or a hospital admittance form.
The films, which consist largely of long, unbroken takes and employ a naturalistic, understated acting style, have the flatness of a documentary, but the emotional impact of great drama. They’re banal yet gripping. In 4 Months, for instance, the stakes of the story are so high that a long scene involving nothing more than a woman trying to book a hotel room from a suspicious concierge becomes as excruciatingly suspenseful as the dentist-drill scene from Marathon Man.
The woman is Otilia (Anamaria Marinca, whom Canadians might recall from her role in the CBC TV-movie Sex Traffic). She’s a college student in 1980s Romania whose friend Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) wants to terminate her pregnancy, but who’s delayed the procedure for a dangerously long amount of time and who now has relied on the more resourceful and strong-willed Otilia to arrange the details: not just to find an abortionist, but to chip in for the hotel room, and then find an alternate hotel room at the last minute when the first one refuses to admit them.
Soon the abortionist—an unremarkable-looking fellow with the incongruously cheerful name Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov)—arrives, and in a masterfully written, directed, and acted scene, immediately takes stock of the situation, noting the two women’s barely concealed desperation and gauging exactly what extra demands he can exact from them before getting down to business.
To his great credit, writer/director Cristian Mungiu doesn’t shy away from depicting the abortion, or, a few scenes later, from showing its gruesome aftermath. (This is not a film for the squeamish.) But perhaps the film’s most agonizing scene doesn’t take place in that hotel room, but at a party in the apartment where Otilia’s boyfriend Adi’s parents live—Adi has obliviously pressured her into putting in an appearance there, and Mungiu’s camera sits on Otilia’s face for what seems like an eternity as she silently listens to the shallow dinner conversation droning on around her, while for all she knows, Gabita could be bleeding to death on the other side of town.
This film was the subject of a lot of outraged newspaper articles last month when it failed to get an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film—it was enough of a scandal, in fact, that nominating committee chairman Mark Johnson admitted a massive reform of the nomination process was probably necessary. It’s a shame Mungiu’s film wasn’t recognized, but do you know what other films weren’t nominated in this category either? The Seventh Seal. Andrei Rublev. Breathless, The 400 Blows, Belle de Jour, The Conformist, Tokyo Story, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Contempt, Persona, Last Year at Marienbad... basically the greatest foreign films of the last half-century.
I’d say 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days belongs in their company—and not just because of its lack of an Oscar nod.
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