Film

Last year at the movies, two fiercely independent American women brought unplanned pregnancies to term—decisions that delighted comedy fans, if not those who confuse protecting abortion with insisting upon it. The attendant debate, a healthy one, should also include this harrowing Romanian drama, which, by dint of release patterns, is coming out now instead of last spring. At that time, it stunned Cannes audiences and won the top prize. But as with Knocked Up and Juno, the movie refracts the difficulties of women through a fun-house mirror of disappointing men. Here, they’re pretty close to nightmarish.

Set in late-1980s Bucharest, still behind the Iron Curtain, Cristian Mungiu’s film concerns Gabita (Vasiliu), a young woman in trouble, and, more centrally, Otilia (Marinca), her tougher friend who’s coming along to support her through an illegal procedure with a black-market abortionist. The centerpiece of the film is that negotiation, which plays out in a nondescript hotel room. The smug Bebe (Ivanov) escalates his demands, and the hellish crucible of economics, power games and sex—what abortion really is for so many—comes into sharp focus.

So it’s a tribute to Mungiu’s unflinching feminism that his very next sequence, an echo of sorts, is almost as powerful: a family dinner at the home of Otilia’s boyfriend. Pinned down by the camera, she endures as older men laugh at her “simple” class, and plan a life of cooking potatoes for her. Otilia’s eventual eruption is cheerworthy.