Mi-am promis sa nu mai scriu despre “4,3,2″, dar uite ca o fac inca o data. Ultima data – si nu scriu eu, ci e recenzia facuta in “The NewYorker” (care mi se pare inspirata si nu exaltata):
n the opening shot of “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” we see a table littered with crockery, a fishtank, and an ashtray. A hand reaches in from the left and taps the ash from a cigarette; only then do we pull back and discover to whom the hand belongs. Most directors would have done the opposite, especially at the outset of a film. But Christian Mungiu, who wrote and directed this new movie, is intent on a story about sundering, about the horror of being invaded and parted from ourselves, and this early case of dismemberment suggests that he has arrived at an honest, if disturbing, way to tell it.
The smoker is Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), a young Romanian woman. We are in a student dorm in Bucharest, and the camera roams the corridors like a hound. There is a strong sense that, were we to follow in the tracks of any of these people, we would stumble upon a crisis. As it is, one figure takes command: Otilia (Anamaria Marinca), Gabita’s roommate. She is cannier and more self-possessed than Gabita, yet there is something threadbare at the edges of her soul. The date is 1987, two years before the end of the Ceauşescu regime, and the middle-aged folk that we encounter seem to have made their accommodation with its rigors. It is the young who seem prematurely sapped, as is soon made clear when Otilia visits two hotels in an effort to book a room. In both places the clerk hardly bothers to look at her, and a smile is out of the question: for all the lack of overt political suppression in the film, something about the dulling of basic courtesies tells us everything about life under the totalitarian grind. Otilia, standing at the check-in desk, might be a lover, wearily seeking refuge for a tryst. In fact, she is dealing not with love but its consequences. And the love isn’t even hers.
Gabita is pregnant. By how many months, exactly, she is too vague to calculate. (That is the job of the title.) A listless victim of fate, she wants an abortion, and it is up to Otilia to help her through the ordeal. Abortion is illegal, hence the hotel room, and hence the arrival of Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov), with his coughing car, his bullet-headed caution, and his unamusing name. He is a terminator, expert in the ending of advanced pregnancies, and you should be warned that “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” flinches neither from the procedures nor the outcome of his trade. There is plenty here to fuel both sides of the abortion debate: the grim and possibly fatal results of driving the practice underground will strengthen the hand of the pro-choice lobby, but, equally, when Otilia kneels on the bathroom floor, surveying the remnant of lost humanity, half wrapped in a towel, the look of dark and wondering pity in her eyes is enough to convince us that here is a deed of unutterable gravity.
Yet this is not an issue movie. We are not being forced to vote, and the characters are defined less by any stated beliefs than by the moral texture of their actions. Look carefully at Bebe as he unpacks his briefcase of crude tools: he is made faceless, filmed from chest to thigh, and that suits his status as a predatory machine. And, once he has departed, having exacted a terrible payment for his services, look at Otilia: She leaves Gabita to rest and goes, as promised, to her boyfriend’s parents’ house for a birthday dinner. There she sits at a table, surrounded by gleaming food and idle chatter, her thoughts miles away and fathoms deep. Again, hands reach in from the side, this time for pickles and wine, but the camera holds steady, minute upon minute, and we gaze at her, face to face. How can people feast when she has just come from the pits of degradation, and must shortly return to dispose of an unwanted fetus? Disposal, incidentally, is recommended via the garbage chute of a high-rise apartment building; try going from this film to “Sweeney Todd,” with its corpses dumped for comic effect, and see how long you last.
All of which makes “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” sound more or less unwatchable. Mungiu’s pacing is so sure, however, in its switching from loose to taut, and the concentration of his leading lady so unwavering, that the movie, which won the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, feels more like a thriller than a moody wallow. When someone approaches Otilia from behind, on an ill-lit street, you brace yourself for the worst. But the film stops short of the worst, by an inch—or, rather, it becomes a concise survey of how to deal with the worst. Do you cave in helplessly, like Gabita? Do you sour into something nastier than the system that bred you, like Bebe? Or do you summon your depleted energy, like Otilia, and brave it out? If so, are we allowed to imagine her, two years later, crowding with tens of thousands of others in front of the Central Committee building and howling down a tyrant? You bet.
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