Not a Choice

[March 12th, 2008]

Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s back-alley abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days has been soaking up critical plaudits since it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes nine months, two weeks and four days ago, but one scene in particular has been consistently cited as praiseworthy. It’s a dinner party, shot in a single long take, with a college student named Otilia at the center of the table. Otilia has taken time out of a very busy schedule to sit silently at this dinner—she has been aiding a friend in procuring an illegal abortion, though this description does not begin to capture the anguish the two women have undergone—and as the party’s banal conversation drags on, the actress Anamaria Marinca wears a look of traumatized incomprehension, as if she cannot believe what has happened to her. As I watched this sequence unfold, I thought I understood how she felt: I couldn’t believe it either.

4 Months places me in an awkward position: I do not admire the film, but I hope to encourage as many people as possible to see it, and to think about what it has to say. It is a movie that has received so much adulation, and addresses such an unpleasant subject, that I fear its reputation—not as a pro-choice movie, or an anti-abortion movie, but as the abortion movie—will be cemented by people respecting it from a safe distance outside the theater.

Mungiu is certainly skilled at making his movie difficult to watch. He reveals the story of Otilia and her roommate Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) at a measured, almost leisurely pace, so that by the time their plan to terminate Gabita’s pregnancy goes horribly askew, the entire city of Bucharest seems choked in dread. In the late days of Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorship in the 1980s, fear was a mundane experience, and Mungiu is adept at capturing this atmosphere—even the act of crossing the street, when seen through his jittery handheld camera, seems fraught with danger. So the events of 4 Months proceed with a nightmarish inevitability, until it appears fated that Otilia and Gabita must end up in a dingy hotel suite with Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov), a leather-jacketed doctor of questionable credentials who offers diabolical proposals in a tone that allows only one answer.

But are these events really inevitable? The effectiveness of 4 Months hinges on the audience accepting that the heroines have been violently and completely stripped of their right to choice. But there are choices being made in the movie, by the characters and their director. Consider just one: a shot, late in the movie, of the grotesque results of the abortion. Mungiu pushes the camera in tight on the remains of Gabita’s fetus, and holds it there for an excruciating duration. The image is dreadful and disarming. Here, we are meant to understand, is honest filmmaking, dedicated to the unvarnished truth. But the image is utterly devoid of meaning. It is not an argument against abortion, or a statement about the barbarities caused by making abortion illegal. The image has nothing to say about abortion. It is simply a degradation—of the characters and the audience. It is simply ugly.

The ugliness of 4 Months is the kind that disguises itself as profundity; it belongs to the school of feel-bad European filmmaking that thinks that showing a distressing image is the same thing as having something to say about it. Mungiu has directed his movie for maximum shock value, and has ramped up the suffering of his characters to a degree that smothers scrutiny; confronted by the sight of a girl having a plastic tube shoved roughly inside her, all questions die on the tongue. This is a film that discourages its audience from thinking about what it means.

Here I find myself in another dilemma, because 4 Months is filled with a sizable number of outrageous incidents, and yet to describe them is to ruin the experience of the film. So, at the risk of sounding patronizing, let me just say this: Go see 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. But after you finish watching it—perhaps well afterward, once the queasy mood has faded—ask yourself a couple of questions. Do you believe Otilia would make the decisions she does? And does Cristian Mungiu have any opinions to offer about abortion? My answer to both of these questions is “No.” And having arrived at that choice, I can’t find this movie worth believing in.