4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

The Cannes Jury likes its Palme d’Or winners heavy on the pathos. 4 Months... shares similarities with 2005 winner L’Enfant – scenes played out in long takes, naturalistic sound and performances, bleached-out handheld camerawork and no music.

Yet, Mungiu’s film is far more accomplished; not bad for a second feature.

Romania – 1987. Resourceful college student Otilia prepares for her roommate Gabita’s abortion. With Gabita paralysed by nerves, Otilia has to arrange a hotel room after her friend botches the booking, and placate the burly abortionist Bebe who is angered at the change of venue.

Discovering how far gone Gabita is, and so by law the procedure constitutes murder, Bebe demands Gabita and Otilia succumb to his sexual advances if he is to help them. And there is still the foetus to dispose of once labour begins.

4 Months… paints a devastating picture of a society brutalized, depressed and cynical after years of Ceausescu rule, where single mothers would be outcast but abortion was punishable by up to ten years inside.

Background details - black marketeers, crumbling estates and the abortionist’s tool kit including a flick-knife - conjure a nightmarish world of deprivation.

Uneasy from the start, by the time Bebe makes his demands, the film is unbearably tense. Mungiu spares the audience the quick, joyless assaults, but depicts the impersonal and clinical abortion procedure in one simple set up, and later drops in a disturbing shot of the aftermath.

Rescuing this from wrist-slitting misery is a vein of black humour and sharp class satire. Otilia queasily sits through a birthday party as the talk turns to fatty meats, and the difficulty of foetus disposal becomes grotesquely comic, though ultimately shattering.

Vasiliu and Ivanov impress as the naïve Gabita and the by turns threatening and unctuous Bebe. But, Marinca is outstanding as Otilia, carrying almost every scene with a muted yet expressive performance.

Stark and bleak, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is a bitter, but affirming tale of friendship surviving (just) in a crushing regime, and is one of the year’s best movies.

Rob Daniel