Cristian Mungiu: interview

Cristian Mungiu wilfully plumped for the dark side with his tale of illegal abortion under Communism in his home country of Romania, he tells Wally Hammond

As our film editor has previously reported, Cannes has been good for Romanian cinema. It’s been five years since young Romanian director Cristian Mungiu impressed critics at the French festival with his debut feature, the socially perspicacious comedy ‘Occident’. Then, in 2005, his compatriot Critsti Puiu made a further mark with his harrowing ‘The Death of Mr Lazarescu’. And, by the time Corneliu Porumboiu took the following year’s Camera d’Or for his clever satire ‘12:08 East of Bucharest’, it was beginning to look like a new filmmaking nation was quietly etching itself a place on the map of world cinema.

But even so, film aficionados were little prepared for the phenomenal success of Mungiu’s second feature, ‘4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days’ – his shockingly vital depiction of survival strategies in the late Communist era, detailing the efforts of a young woman, Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) to aid her friend, Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) in her desperate search for an abortion – which scooped the festival’s Palme d’Or with a rare and heartwarming unanimity of praise and support. ‘4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days’ is a bold, immediate work. Its tense engagement and relevance is so contemporary that you hardly notice it’s set in the late 1980s.

‘Touring with “Occident”, I met a lot of people of my own age,’ the director recently explained to me in London. ‘I am a baby boomer, the generation born in the years from, say, 1966 to 1972. What I discovered was that there is a certain solidarity among people belonging to this generation and these people would want to see, at some point, a film representing them and the way they lived.’

To that end, Mungiu had written a series of scripts about growing up in the late Ceausescu era for a project he had enticingly and wryly entitled ‘Tales from the Golden Age’. ‘The comment I got from some of the younger people I showed the scripts to was, “Wow! It must have been very funny to live then!” And I realised they’d got me all wrong. So it was then that I knew I needed to start this series with something that wouldn’t be light or humorous, and which would be more accurate to the feeling of the period as I can remember it.’

His story is simple, but its themes are large. It’s a film about how deeply politics – notably the series of repressive policies pursued by Ceausescu in his later years, such as his banning of artificial birth control and elective abortions in 1966 – affect the very texture of human lives.

If last year’s ‘The Lives of Others’ made palpable the Stasi-sponsored paranoia of East Germany, Mungiu’s film makes real the terror experienced by some of Romania’s hapless or helpless innocents. His film is an empathetic triumph, informed by personal experience and embodied by remarkable performances, not least from his two superb leads.

‘The story itself is close to one a girl first told me some 15 years ago,’ he explains. ‘It was only last year that I bumped into her again. To be honest, I never thought I was going to make a film out of it. I was trying, rather, to adopt the kind of attitude that the film’s characters have by the end: “We are never going to talk about this again.” But it’s not possible. And it struck me that, after so many years, it brought back so much emotion and anger about the period. I thought: This is important for me to say. It will make a difference.’

Mungiu made two key decisions in the telling. ‘First, I knew I wanted to stick to a very realistic perspective, and to keep to a linear narrative – to start in the morning and finish in the afternoon – but I wanted to allow some things in the film, some things which I don’t have an answer for. That is how life works. I also knew even when I was writing that I wanted to film long takes, even if I wasn’t sure that I was going to use one take for all the scenes.’

The other important decision was to use widescreen. Mungiu and his cinematographer Oleg Mutu decided to use a wider format to enable the actors to roam more freely on the set, to bring in offscreen space, and to minimise their role ‘as authors’. ‘I wanted to make a point with this, to show that Otilia’s world is way bigger than what you see.’

The bigger picture emerges slowly, as the movie and its tone mutate from uncertainty to tension, anxiety and fear, and then to something deeper and moving: a portrait of a friendship, albeit one forged under duress.

‘You know, it is very difficult to use the thriller format. It was difficult for me to keep true to the emotions of the girls. I wanted to get inside Otilia’s head – I wanted the viewer to see the film from the perspective of someone in that period.’

Mungiu sounds gratified by the reception of his film – ‘Unless we got this kind of recognition it wouldn’t have been possible for us Romanians to make these films’ – but is concerned about his domestic industry. ‘In 1989, we had 400 cinemas; now we have 35. So I said: Okay, whatever I do, I can’t reach many people doing this. So, last summer I organised a caravan that tours Romania with my film, screening it in places that no longer have a cinema. We had an excellent result.’

The director has no immediate plans to direct another film. But he continues his work in advertising and television and is looking for new directors to helm his other scripts of ‘Golden Age’ tales.

‘If there is anything common within this wave,’ Mungiu remarks finally, referring to his fellow directors of the New Romanian Cinema, ‘it is a reaction to the kind of cinema that Romania was making in the late ’80s and early ’90s. That is what we have to fight, you know? To fight
all the time.’

‘4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days’ is now previewing at the Curzon Mayfair and Renoir cinemas and opens on Jan 11.