The Romanian drama, “4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days,” was showered with praise and prizes on the international film festival circuit last year.
Writer-director Cristian Mungiu took home Canne’s grand prize — the Palme D’Or — as the well as the top prize in the European Film Awards competition and the Best Foreign Film award of our own National Society of Film Critics.
For reasons that are not clear, this unanimously praised picture is not one of the five nominees for the best foreign language film Oscar that will be given out on Feb. 24, so the U.S, distribution is likely to be slow and spotty.
The movie opened today at the Cine 1-4 in New Haven and is expected to expand to more theaters during the next few weeks (I’ll be doing a review in next week’s Preview section of the Connecticut Post).
It’s too bad the film is not in the Oscar race because it acts as a strong corrective to the best picture nominee “Juno,” that bizarre but hugely successful comedy about teenage pregnancy.
“Juno” never addresses the issues of teen pregnancy, adoption or abortion with any seriousness — which is probably one of the reasons it has been so successful in a movie season dominated by downers like the fellow best picture nominees “No Country for Old Men” and “There Will Be Blood.”
I wish that the teen girls who have taken “Juno” to heart would also take a look at “4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days” which follows two Romanian college students — in the final days of that country’s Communist regime — as they try to arrange an illegal abortion for one of the girls.
Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) has tried to ignore her condition for four months — and in good times would probably be a blithe charmer like Juno — but decides on an abortion rather than the financial and emotional disaster of carrying her baby to term.
Gabita is aided in her quest by college roommate and best friend Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) who doesn’t realize what she is getting into when she agrees to stay with her friend during the experience of meeting the abortionist (Vlad Ivanov) in a hotel and going through the procedure there.
Because all three of the major characters are subject to severe criminal charges if anyone figures out what they are doing in the hotel, “4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days” turns into a suspense film as well as a strong human drama.
As the story progresses, the friend Otilia becomes the central character and Marinca’s performance is quite stunning (her intense work is made even more impressive by the fact that many key scenes are done without any cuts and run for several minutes).
