#3

Arguably, the most impressive thing about Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days is its matter-of-fact tone. There’s ample opportunity for highly charged scenes given the subject. Cristian Mungiu’s film follows a woman in mid-eighties Romania who helps her college roommate get an illegal abortion. It follows the progress of this with a measured, consistent attention to all of the details–securing the hotel room, coordinating the trip around other plans, negotiating with the abortionist–that makes it feel like the film is passing in real time, almost agonizingly so. Through it all, the film never stoops to sensationalizing the situation. This doesn’t mean it’s overly cautious. In fact, there’s a bracing bluntness to everything depicted onscreen that gives it a far more challenging grittiness, a verisimilitude that makes the toughest moments all the more wrenching. It’s all held together by a rock solid performance by Anamaria Marinca as the young woman who is handling everything for her pregnant, seemingly more immature friend. Much of the emotional impact of the film is generated by her reactions, particularly a sense of building exasperation tinged with the recognition that she could easily find herself in her own dire situation, alone and lost and in desperate need of help. Every note of the performance is spot-on, showing the subtle shifts of her character as the trying evening progresses. Like the film, it a stirring exercise in onscreen honesty.

(Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”)