#39 — 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, 2007)
The city the characters move through is a bleached slate gray, as if all the color had been systematically drained from it. As if a cold, winter sky descended and retreated, leaving behind an ashen chill. Set in a Romanian city in the mid-eighties, there is an unrelenting sense of weary oppression in the air. The paltriest goods are traded illicitly on a dorm room table, all interactions are tinged with suspicion and people move through the world constantly braced against unforeseen dangers. There’s a bleakness inherent in watching these people operate in a state of perpetual psychic strain, even aside from the explosive issue at the core of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.

Anamaria Marinca plays a university student who helps her roommate procure an illegal abortion. That is essentially the entirety of the plot. She has difficulty getting a hotel room in which to stage the procedure, deals with the shifting parameters and ultimately insidious machinations of the man hired to perform the abortion, and holds herself together as the fraught emotions of the moment hang heavily while she fulfills her separate personal obligations. Under the delicate, measured attentiveness of write-director Cristian Mungiu, the film is gripping and wrenching in its very simplicity. Nothing here needs to be amped up or pushed dramatically. Instead, the matter-of-fact depiction of the incidents that string together to form this long, quietly harrowing day are enough. The pain of the story exists in the sidelong glances of accusation and sympathy. Showy scenes would disrupt the balance, making it a political polemic. In this form, it is a deeply personal story, and all the more effective because of it.

This is largely because Mungiu has so effectively captured the psychology of this moment for these people. There is the immature detachment of the woman receiving the abortion and the guilt-free opportunism of the man performing it. Most potent, most moving is what we see in Marinca’s character. She is orchestrating everything out of a sense of obligation, not to her friend, but to herself. In the dead end society where she lives, there is always the chance that she herself will someday need similar backroom efforts. It presses down on her, this feeling of potential future helplessness, the worry that she may be without support if her day comes. Her roommate is weak, her boyfriend is oblivious. She is sensible and dependable and wrought by the suspicion that there may not be anyone properly equipped to step in for her. She provides for her roommate as a sort of insurance, but also, it seems, because she sees herself there, humbled and lost by some future mistake. Helping is something she must do, the only thing she can do. They live in a place, at a time with little promise of a positive future. Solving the now becomes even more vital. It is a fraught situation in an exhausting life, and Anamaria Marinca conveys every bit of it with plain perfection.

Mungiu holds his shots, letting scenes play out unadorned. We get the mundane alongside the emotionally catastrophic, the weight of the day increased by seeing how the casual and the troubling interact. We get the entirety of conversations, slowly discovering the way people talk around their concerns and seeing how emotions shift and burn. Mungiu’s verite stylings make the tough moments even harsher and the brief tastes of grace as moving as can be. The camera is often pulled back from the scene, sedately, somberly catching everything. By probing less directly, Mungiu manages to get deeper into his characters, their dilemmas and the smothering world they move through and strain against. His approach is stark, hard and brutally honest. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is proof that this approach can result in a striking, uncompromising film.

(Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”)