Agenda Movie Club: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

Cristian Mungiu

2007

It’s a cliche by now to describe a movie as “unflinching,” but what else would you call this? The camera simply won’t look away. It won’t even blink.

There are so many looooooong takes here. Roger Ebert says that it’s one shot per scene, but I’m not sure that’s quite right.

Two scenes stuck out to me in particular, and they happen nearly back-to-back. The first is directly after the abortion, when Mr. Bebe leaves the room, and all we see is Otilia sitting in a chair (Gabita, who just had the procedure, is out of view). She sits for a very long time. No one says anything. Then she gets up and we see an empty chair for a very long time. It’s devastating.

And then she goes to her boyfriend’s house, because he insisted she come for a dinner party, and we have another scene that’s nearly as excruciating, but in a completely different way. We see Otilia sitting in the middle of a very loud conversation at the dinner table, though she’s not participating. Just one shot of many people talking about things that can’t even come close to being as important as what Otilia just went through. I don’t know how many minutes this scene goes on, but it feels like forever. It’s pretty stunning, and pretty painful.

There’s so much here that a person could talk about. Should we look at the characters? And notice that we know pretty much nothing at all about Gabita, who is having the abortion, except that she seems to have pretty much no clue how “things work?” And that the movie is really about Otilia, who is helping her friend while the entire rest of the world is completely self-absorbed?

Should we look at the world that’s created when abortion isn’t legal and safe? This is a horror show.

Should we look at this in the context of Ceausescu’s regime? I can’t really do that, because I don’t know enough. This is one of those cases when I feel like I’d gain so much more if I really understood the context.

There’s so much we don’t know about the backstory of the people in the movie. There’s so much we have to figure out. And sometimes, they’re lying to us, and we have to figure that out, too. Amy pointed out that the title of the movie is very specific, even while that exact piece of information– how long Gabita has been pregnant– is hazy and obfuscated during the movie itself.

This is the movie that beat No Country for Old Men for the Palme D’Or at Cannes. You know by now how I feel about No Country, but I can understand what people were thinking by giving this the award. It’s so stark and difficult, and it’s apparently a world some people want to go back to.