4 Luni, 3 Saptamini si 2 Zile (4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days) by Cristian Mungiu

It could have been an innocuous, detailed account. Four months, three weeks and two days. Except that the title of Cristian Mungiu’s film hides an unrelenting countdown. 4, 3, 2 : one declared death sentence. At this stage of a pregnancy, abortion is entirely illegal. Practised in spite of everything, the act then becomes clandestine. Doubly traumatising. Such is the starting point of 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days. Gabita, a young student living in university halls, prepares herself for an illegal abortion within the walls of a city-centre hotel room. From the early morning preparations until the middle of the night, her roommate, Otilia, will accompany her throughout this irreversible ordeal, which will leave her too deeply marked. Humiliated and violated following the blackmail imposed upon them by the ‘angel-maker’, handsomely paid for what is a most rudimentary operation, the two young women must then dispose of the foreign body, “expelled” even from the bathroom tiling.

Unbearable, Otila’s frantic and lonely wandering leads her through the labyrinth of small, dirty streets of a town plunged into the inky black of an endless night, disturbed by barking dogs and the sound of unknown footsteps. Almost hounded, she will finish her blind race at the top of a squalid stairwell, facing the flap of a narrow rubbish chute. The deed is horrifying. Return to the sizzling neon lights of the hotel. On the ground floor, the popular music of a finishing marriage ceremony sounds. Between the two friends, only one question remains : was she able to bury it or not ? The question is a murmur, the response a last sealed pact between them. Not to be spoken of again. Forget, already. Try to forget. Give birth to a new secret. An unyielding urban and social tale capturing a harsh reality, 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days reveals a form of cinema of urgency, refusing all pathos and dead screen time. We are made to think of the Dardenne brothers. In imposing a very raw style, Cristian Mungiu sets himself apart from the tragicomic, a common trait within young Romanian cinema. Indirectly however, he shares with his compatriots an attraction towards relating stories which belong to their recent communist past.

Although the theme of abortion is not specifically Romanian, it brings to the fore the past of a country traumatised by CeauÅŸescu’s regime. One of the first laws to be repealed after the fall of the regime was “decree 770”, put into effect in 1966, forbidding abortion for women under the age of 40 who had not already conceived at least four children. The negative consequences of this pro-natalist policy were many : the development of clandestine abortion, the considerable rise in maternal mortality rates, etc. This second feature film from Cristian Mungiu reminds us that the after-effects of what was called by CeauÅŸescu “the Golden Age of Romania” have not finished healing.

Emilie Padellec