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4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
R1 - America - Genius Products - IFC Films Review written by and copyright: Jeremiah Chin (10th July 2008). |
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The Film
 I didn’t get a chance to see “4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days” (2007) in theatres, but I seemed to catch the trailer before every movie I saw in theatres for about a month burning into my mind the notion of a Soviet-bloc-black-market-abortion movie into my brain. Combine that with the fact that it won the Palme D’Or at Cannes in 2007; so I prepared myself for an intense political/morality play on communists and abortions. While the idea and process of the abortion itself is the driving force of the movie, as cliché as it may sound, it’s not what the movie is really ‘about.’ The film starts with Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) gathering supplies from their dorm-mates as she prepares to help her room-mate and friend Gabriela (Laura Vasiliu) get an abortion later that day. Otilia must find purchase hotel room for them to stay in so Gabriela can have the procedure and have time to recuperate in anonymity, meet ‘Mr. Bebe’ (Vlad Ivanov) who will perform the procedure and find time to attend her boyfriend’s mother’s birthday party in one night. Once she meets up with Mr. Bebe, thing’s haven’t gone exactly to plan and the tension escalates. I was surprised at the fact that the movie wasn’t as overtly political or intense as the trailer made it out to be. It rapidly becomes a character study of Otilia as she tries to balance her obligations, conflicted about how deep her commitment needs to run to her friends who at times appear to be flaking out and leaving their obligations to her ignored. The acting by Marinca is really well done; she comes off with natural and realistic reactions and never overdramatizes her expressions. It’s a little hard to tell whether or not the dialogue is flowing as well as the subtitles let on, but the actors play their parts well. For me the most unexpected piece was the directing. There have been a handful of European movies to come out in the past five years or so that just focus on long steady character shots, letting their characters talk with little to no camera movement, but it gets fairly monotonous quickly and has a tendancy to put me to sleep (with 2005’s “Caché” holding title as the worst of the bunch). Writer/Director Cristian Mungiu however has something that sets him apart from the crowd with “4 Months.” One shot in particular that was really impressive was the long dinner party sequence where Otilia sits uncomfortably listening to the stories of her boyfriend’s parent’s friend’s chat and converse. The shot is long and the camera doesn’t move, but the dialogue is perfectly pitched for the awkward dinner party filled with older people and the camera placement keeps Otilia and her boyfriend at the center surrounded by dinner guests that crowd the rest of the frame. More importantly, this dinner party happens just minutes after Gabriela has had the abortion performed, and the success of the procedure is still unknown. There is still talk about the idea of abortions in the movie, Otilia and her boyfriend debate the issue after the dinner party and there’s a lot of talk about the punishment for performing abortions in 1980’s Romania, but it isn’t preachy or moralistic. The film instead seems to take a very pragmatic look at the stresses on people due to the secrecy of the whole issue, Gabriela’s reason for deciding to get an abortion aren’t discussed and much of the tension is generated around getting found out, but it never seems that likely that anyone will find out about the ordeal. The intensity comes from the characters and their positioning, both in a social and filmic sense, but that intensity really gets built up and tries for a quick release ending that didn’t sit well. Overall the movie is good, but suffers from the pacing that’s still a little too slow and could use more character development for those surrounding Otilia, especially in Gabriela and Otilia’s boyfriend who wind up being fairly one dimensional. The directing otherwise is fairly interesting and the writing is good, but again the ending tries to skirt the line between climatic and anticlimactic that it really doesn’t do much for me.
Video
“4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days” is presented in a 1.78:1 anamorphic aspect ratio (which isn't the original theatrical ratio) and looks fairly clean, there are some rough spots but otherwise looks nice. The grain isn’t too noticeable, and it’s hard to tell about the colors in the movie as it’s mostly a dull gray city and some depressing looking buildings that seem to characterize movies about Eastern European Communist countries in the 1980’s. The movie is otherwise well lit for setting the tone and the mood and the directing has a fairly good sense of visual style to keep the eye interested for some of the longer shots.
Audio
Presented in Romanian Dolby Digital 2.0 surround sound, the audio sounds fine, but not much more. The film is dialogue heavy and uses a good amount of ambient sound to set the mood in some of the eerier moments of the movie, but could definitely have benefited from a surround sound track to make the ambient sound more impactful. Otherwise the levels between the ambient score and the dialogue are good and the sound comes through clean and clear. Optional subtitles are presented in English, English for the hearing impaired and Spanish.
Extras
Genius has included a documentary, a couple of interviews and some theatrical trailers, below is a closer look: “1 Month with 4 Month, 3 weeks and 2 Days: A documentary Film by Sorin Avram” runs for 15 minutes and 37 seconds (more on the featurette side than a full documentary) and covers a 30 day Romanian tour that was an attempt to distribute and show “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” in areas of Romania that do not have any movie theatres, apparently there are only 50 movie theatres for the entire country and so the tour covered 15 cities in 30 days. There are interviews with the projectionists and the people involved in the tour along with the people who saw the movie along the tour and does a good job in covering lack of theaters in Romania and the attempt to show Romanians the first Romanian movie to win the Palme D’Or. Next is an interview with writer/director/producer Cristian Mungiu runs for 25 minutes and 20 seconds, this interview deals with the development of the plot and idea for the movie from a story he had heard from a friend years before. He makes some interesting points about how he crafted the movie to be so focused on the story of the abortion he avoided the politicization potential that I mentioned earlier and how he tried to give the film a more natural feel by leaving certain elements hanging, and importantly talks about the long-take dinner scene that impressed me so much. Overall an interesting interview that has a good length, but is nearly exclusively a single-shot interview, with a small amount behind the scenes, clips from the film and only a few section titles to break the long talking sequences. The interview with cinematographer Oleg Mutu runs for 6 minutes and 26 seconds, the interview is interesting and has a large amount of behind the scenes footage as Mutu talks about the lighting techniques and all the odd rigs he had to put together to get the right lighting for the mood the film was trying to set, though I wish they would have used more behind the scenes footage to see more of the process. There is also a theatrical trailer that runs for 1 minute and 50 seconds. There are also 3 preloaded startup bonus trailers for: - “Chronicle of an Escape” which runs for 1 minute and 12 seconds. - “The Killing of John Lennon” runs for 1 minute and 16 seconds. - “After the Wedding” runs for 2 minutes and 16 seconds.
Overall
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