IFC Films
Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) and Gabita (Laura Vasiliu)
I guess Cristian Mungiu's film "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year and finally opened in the United States last weekend, will forever be labeled "the Romanian abortion movie." That is, after all, a literally correct description: It's 1987, or thereabouts, and two college roommates, Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) and Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), must descend into the hellish underside of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu's totalitarian state in order to secure Gabita an illegal abortion. Bribery, humiliation, sexual blackmail, the threat of prison, and the possibility of a painful and miserable death are all involved.
But that description of content might lead you to expect a certain kind of form -- either Dickensian social drama or deliberately dreary, vérité-style realism. Even some people who've seen "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" seem to have missed the fact that it's a carefully plotted thriller, as ingeniously constructed as a Hitchcock movie. (Maybe the Academy's foreign-language selection committee did grasp this. After all, if "4 Months, 3 Weeks" really were a soporific, vitamin-packed message movie about abortion, it would surely have gotten an Oscar nomination.)