4 Luni, 3 Saptamâni si 2 Zile (4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days) (2008)

The first shot of 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days is a doozy: the inside of a dorm room belonging to Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) and Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), winter; the photography has an antiseptic chilliness, and later, when casting its gaze upon the pale Otilia nuzzling and deeply kissing her boyfriend, Adi, inspires repulsion at the lips and skin contact. I have seen this effect before, probably for the very first time in Larry Clark’s Kids where sex was de-eroticized and photographed to look like two husks of smeared flesh were sucking on one another – the skin contact was sickly and hungry: it was gross – and in Cristian Mungiu’s film, while not smeared, the paleness of the actors’ skin, the chilliness of the photography, drains any and all warmth from the physical intimacy. Sex is often like heroin or sleep for some, operating as a momentary escape (witness the animal hunger of Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook) frenziedly pushing her naked skin upon her boyfriend’s naked skin in Mike Leigh's similarly grim social drama, Secrets & Lies (1996), another Palme d’Or winner), a warm body serving as a relief from gray, desolate surroundings. Only these bodies do not look warm, and when they touch one another, the thought of it producing more pallid, dreary souls seems devastating.


Cristian Mungiu has produced a formidable work here, though I have a rather significant reservation.

Spoilers ahead: if you’ve not seen the film, I’d recommend not continuing the review.

Employing long takes and breathing an air of grim urgency into every scene, especially when the handheld camera is tremoring slightly, subliminally, the film commands your attention; even without sound, it is evident that some harrowing, somber inevitability is underway. The kitchen-sink drabness of the proceedings and the often tremoring hand-held 35mm camerawork is reminiscent of another Romanian film, a film some have compared to “watching paint dry,” Cristi Puiu’s Moartea domnului Lazarescu or The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005). However, to find fault with the mundane tedium of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is to completely miss the point, which is the mundane tedium, how what should be the poignant and moving death of a lonely old man becomes a tiresome slog through red tape and the banalities of hospital bureaucracy, rendering his death a relief for the viewer rather than a tragedy. The film is brilliant, an insidious masterpiece. What that film did right and what 4 Months does wrong is Lazarescu doesn’t compromise its seemingly uneventful story. Shot to produce a slightly more rigorous tone of hyper-realism, 4 Months makes a sharp and disastrous turn into lurid melodrama.


If this had been an American film or something that hadn’t won the Palme d’Or or something that didn’t enforce such a grave tone of kitchen sink hyper-realism, then the two girls, Otilia and Gabita, prostituting themselves to the abortionist, would have been predictable. But in a prestige piece like this, such lurid melodrama breaks the atmosphere of quiet despair with a loud, obvious, even clichéd manipulation of viewers' emotions. Perhaps such things really happened, but the way it is handled here is so indelicate, so loud, it struck me as the most unexpected type of pandering.

Everything up to this point is properly prosaic: Otilia’s inability to retrieve a room in the first hotel, the quibbling of the hotel management of the second hotel who insist on exasperating red tape procedures in order to simply reserve a room, the finding of the taxi driver, reassuring the taxi driver, who, we gather from his briefcase, is the abortion proprietor, explaining the reasons why Gabita didn’t follow the arrangements they had discussed over the phone to the man, Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov), Bebe’s lecturing them on why Gabita should have followed the instructions, and then lecturing them on the consequences of the procedure, and then lecturing them on the details, then making sure Gabita is telling him the truth about her circumstances, and finding she lied, asking her why, and if she still wants to continue with the procedure. He drinks some water and tells her to think it over while he steps into the bathroom. When he comes out, she says she does, and then he asks about money. They explain that the hotel room was more expensive than they thought it would be, and he lectures them some more. Otilia, getting sick of his self-righteous laying down of rules and exasperating lectures, becomes visibly perturbed, which makes him erupt in anger and threaten to leave. Gabita begs him not to. Next thing we know, he and Otilia are undressing, Gabita steps out for a cigarette, she steps back in, goes in the bathroom, which Otilia enters, nude from the waist down, and then exits, as Otilia proceeds to squat in the bathtub and scrub her genitals with a bar of soap. I’m sorry, but this is wrong, wrong, wrong. The horror of the film was being very nicely underplayed without having Otilia (and also Gabita it seems to imply) prostitute themselves to the abortionist. After seeing such devolution of the story, I would not have been surprised to see Otilia use the knife she found in Bebe’s briefcase to stab him to death.

Again, such things may have happened, but that doesn’t mean such things, when used for dramatic effect, are not clichés, even if they are rationalized as being non-literal, or a metaphor. Though the film earns back its presented tone of hyper-realism later, and the film continues to be perfectly photographed, lit, and framed, this sequence is fundamental to the film’s impact. In my opinion, the impact is severely dulled by the wrong-headedness of such a plot turn.

Nevertheless, the film is crucial viewing for anyone serious about art films, and despite my reservations, I am neither dismayed nor surprised that it won the Palme d'Or, which, unlike the Academy Awards, by and large, is a signifier of a truly quality film (if you don't believe me, check out some of the other films that won it: The Conversation, Taxi Driver, L'Albero Degli Zoccoli (The Tree of Wooden Clogs), Apocalypse Now, Barton Fink, Pulp Fiction, the already mentioned Secrets & Lies, L'Enfant (The Child), all, if not masterpieces, indisputably thought-provoking and profound works of art). While not the former in my opinion, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days is most definitely the latter.


Grade: A-