Age of gold

4 Months is the hottest Romanian import since The Death of Mr. Lazarescu.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days was the discovery of last May’s Cannes Film Festival, where second-time feature director Cristian Mungiu won the top prize over a slate of seasoned auteurs. Nearly nine months later, the acclaim was so deafening that the movie was suddenly notable for not winning. Denied a nomination by the Academy’s foreign-language voters in January, the film has been held up as one of Oscar’s most egregious oversights. “You can put it right up there with the Best Picture win by Crash,” mused LA Weekly’s Scott Foundas.

When we spoke with Mungiu at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, the film was the talk of the town. It was heralded as another example of a long-take style that—viewed alongside Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest—constituted evidence of a Romanian new wave. In near real time, 4 Months follows Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) as she helps her friend Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) obtain an illegal abortion in 1987 Romania, navigating a world of stringent hotel ID checks and fielding the demands of an abortionist (Vlad Ivanov) who’s holding all the cards.

Mungiu, who was born in 1968 in the middle of Romania’s baby boom, originally wanted to make a film called Tales of the Golden Age, a two-part “subjective history” of the end of Communism in Romania. (The “Golden Age” was the ironic name that Nicolae Ceausescu’s propaganda machine gave to the last 15 years of his rule.) The script for that project was vastly different in tone from 4 Months. “I got these reactions from some young actors,” Mungiu says, “and they apparently considered from my script that it must have been very funny to live during the Communist times—which is not what I wanted to pass at all.” He designed 4 Months as a serious counterpart to Tales, which has since ballooned into a multifilm series.

Documenting the intricacies of the black market, 4 Months is unmistakably a political film, but it’s one that transcends easy political reading. Mungiu is coy about revealing his own views on abortion. “This is what I consider to be the strength of the film—that I pass no direct judgments,” he says. “The only thing that I’m saying is that people should consider all the consequences of their decisions, and it’s up to them to use their freedom to decide.”

It’s purely coincidental that the film opens in the same year as Juno and Knocked Up (not to mention Tony Kaye’s underseen Lake of Fire, a documentary on abortion as shrill as the debate itself). In many ways, 4 Months’ true subject is the passing of time. The theme is present in the title, which refers to the length of Gabita’s pregnancy; in the strict deadlines against which Otilia races; and in the emphasis Mungiu places on the hours the women spend apart. The film’s climax finds Otilia stranded at an interminable birthday dinner, all the while thinking about Gabita. Mungiu choreographs the scene in a masterful single take.

“The use of the long [takes] came initially from this desire of wanting to allow the actors the time to develop real emotions in front of the camera,” Mungiu explains. “What we were trying to do is…to render what she was feeling and what she was experiencing in terms of anxiety and of time passing.”

Mungiu’s compatriot Puiu also employed real time as a style in The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, which Mungiu hails a “great film.” “I honestly think that it was possible for me to be accepted in competition in Cannes because of the success of the other Romanian films in the last five years,” he says. “I think we all contributed to the sense that there’s something happening in Romania now."

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days opens Friday 8 at the Music Box.

---