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-

A Tribute to Paul Newman by David Letterman

Last night on David Letterman, there was a short but terribly moving tribute to Paul Newman showing clips of Newman's various appearances on David Letterman over the years accompanied by Rufus Wainwright's "(Cold and Broken) Hallelujah" . I tried finding a video that was limited to just the brief clip, but all I could find was the long version where Dave, with all due respect, prattles on and on with an anecdote about Paul Newman, he, and a custom-made car Newman got him as a gift. Last night, it was moderately amusing, as Dave's stammering and acerbic befuddlement usually is, but if you want to skip straight to the tribute, just drag the cursor to 7:28, and try not to get choked up.

Reconsidering Burn After Reading

I found myself thinking about God the other night, and the universe, and the term, “Third Rock from the Sun” (did that term originate from the John Lithgow television series?). Why is it that people have to anthropomorphize the source of creation? The Sun and the collected detritus that naturally found itself in its orbit is an organic product, something that occurred from an unconscious chain reaction, like the way the wind might knock over a pie sitting on a windowsill. The pie falls on the grass outside and over time is descended upon by a colony of insects that feeds off the seemingly unlimited resources of the pie for years. The insects birth larvae and the larvae never know a life of not existing in the toppled berry mush. Not having any conception of how the pie landed where it did, they invent a figure with a personality, who they give a face and a fabricated back-story, and this Being was responsible for creating the pie. Even if a more pragmatic insect concluded that the wind was responsible for toppling the pie, then the insects would want to anthropomorphize the wind and worship it as if was sentient. The Big Bang, or whatever you want to call the series of natural acceleration of energy and matter that set off a chain reaction that produced the cosmos, is not a conscious entity. It is an unconscious natural phenomenon. If you want to call an unconscious natural force God, so be it, but then it is not a thinking, feeling, caring, opinionated, aware Creator. God is science and vice-versa.

It may seem ludicrous for me to preface a reconsidering of the merits of an essentially minor work of the brothers Coen with a convoluted and probably belabored analogy of the difference between a conscious God and an unconscious god, but it helps me to remember that in all of their films, the universe is indifferent. The good suffer, and the bad do as they wish unnoticed, under an unseeing sky. So, it seems foolish of me, knowing the world of the Coen brothers so well, to suddenly be angry with them for continuing their trend of displaying a worldview they have always displayed. Burn After Reading is irony of the bitterest and cruelest sort: think about it: the impetus for everything that goes wrong is the shallow pursuit of maintaining fit bodies, either as a means to a hotter sex life or in Osborne Cox’s case, well I don’t know exactly why he was at the gym when he lost his CIA “shit.” Why he would take his electronic memoirs with him in his gym bag is a question that can be answered by surrendering that it is an implausible contrivance that must happen or else there would no film (or the Coen Brothers would have to exert more effort in finding better circumstances for superficial body-obsessed types to come into contact with the disc; this reconsideration of the film does not strike its slapdash manner from the record). But, surely, caustic commentary on the depressing culture of Youth, Sex, Bodies that has been eroding the priorities of our nation for a couple decades now is needed more caustic than ever? I think so. And perhaps, though he is the sweetest character of the film, Chad’s appalling murder is not so very pointless after all. Whether the Coens have any pity for poor Chad is not too ambiguous, as they don’t seem to have pity for any of the shallow, murderous, or shallow/murderous buffoons preposterously coming into contact with one another. The film’s poster says all you really need to know about Burn After Reading’s evil sense of humor: one person spies on somebody whose lethalness they are ignorant of, and the lethal person being spied upon, being ignorant of the spying ignorant’s innocuousness, shoots him dead. It’s a hideous misunderstanding. Such things do happen. And the universe doesn’t have an opinion.



The original C+ review

"...this country would have completely lost its collective shit..."

Apropos the last Maher-related post, here's a segment from a very recent episode (Sept. 19, 2008) of Real Time:

Happy Birthday Naomi Watts

Naomi Watts. David Lynch put her on the map, and she did not forget that fact, appearing in a 50 minute film he made, called "Rabbits." Some of this footage was later used in Inland Empire. She, along with Laura Harring, voiced one of the rabbits in this sequence (Is she the one sitting or standing?):


When she is upset or in anguish, few actresses come off as explosively wound up (Hope Davis is good at playing tightly wound women on the verge of hysteria too).

As Diane Selwyn, in Mulholland Dr., the ratty robe she wears precisely captures a tangible form of the frayed nerves of her psyche. Even more frayed are her nerves in 21 Grams, where she seems to be carrying around a ticking time bomb in her expression wherever she goes:


...her haggard features lighted so as to seem even paler than usual, damages to her soul gradually surfacing in her face. She scowls a lot, I've noticed, and when she does, you want to cross to the other side of the street to avoid it. She's a fierce actress, and serious, some might say too serious, as if she is displaying pretense to a gravity that she has not earned yet. Though I would not dismiss that objection immediately, I would tell someone dubious of Watts to watch her in several different films (which would not be a hardhsip, considering the sheer number of quality films she consistently seeks out to appear in).

Mulholland Dr. is one of my all-time favorites. I love The Assassination of Richard Nixon, a film her character is in very little. She plays the ex-wife of Sam Bicke (Sean Penn), the pitiable salesman whose deteriorating sanity and repeatedly trampled self-esteem conspire over the course of the film to produce an unhinged, cockamamie plot to fly a plane into the White House. Her character is vital in establishing the momentum of Bicke's despair, and Naomi Watts is devastating in the way she slights her ex-husband, disgusted by his whiny ineffectualism and trying, with less and less patience, to express her utter disinterest in his companionship, despite the fact that they share two children. Naomi Watts is one of those women who could crush a man with one dismissive glance, and her performance mixed with Penn's pathological neediness produces riveting and devastating moments of botched social interactions.

She has worked with three of my very favorite film directors (Lynch, Cronenberg, Haneke), and has a body of work that is unmatched in its commitment to scouting auteurs and in laboring to create substantive work. You don't see her doing Revlon commercials like Julianne Moore and Halle Berry or L'Oreal commercials like Penelope Cruz or perfume ads like Nicole Kidman. She is an artist, not a product. That puts her ahead of those four, as well as many of the rest of the actresses working in film currently.

In Anticipation of Religulous: Defending Bill Maher

Larry Charles (above, left) is someone I admired long before he directed the virtually unanimously acclaimed Borat:CLoAfMBGNoK. He was a writer on Seinfeld and directed more than 10 episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm. It made sense that HBO veterans Sacha Baron Cohen and Charles would find themselves collaborating on a film, a film that would go on to become the most critically acclaimed American comedy of the new decade. I really liked Borat quite a bit, and when I stumbled onto this poster:


...sometime last November or thereabouts, I was a little saddened that Charles’s follow-up would be centered around the detestable Bill Maher, who I knew very little about other than the fact that he held hopelessly liberal beliefs, and wore a countenance that radiated smug.

Well, since then I’ve read about and watched a lot more of Maher. After 9/11, when every American who wasn’t crying tears of blood or flying into a fit of vengeful rage at anybody who looked even vaguely Middle-Eastern was formally declared unpatriotic or traitorous, it took massive guts, balls, backbone, whichever body part serves the idiom best, to say what Bill Maher said, on September 17, 2001, a mere six days after the attacks, on his ABC show Politically Incorrect, when speaking to guest Dinesh D’Souza:

D’Souza: Bill, there's another piece of political correctness I want to mention. And, although I think Bush has been doing a great job, one of the themes we hear constantly is that the people who did this are cowards.

Maher: Not true.

D’Souza: Not true. Look at what they did. First of all, you have a whole bunch of guys who are willing to give their life. None of them backed out. All of them slammed themselves into pieces of concrete.

Maher: Exactly.

D’Souza: These are warriors. And we have to realize that the principles of our way of life are in conflict with people in the world. And so -- I mean, I'm all for understanding the sociological causes of this, but we should not blame the victim. Americans shouldn't blame themselves because other people want to bomb them.

Maher: But also, we should -- we have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly. You're right.

Warriors? Eh. Does it really take a brave warrior to overpower a female flight-attendant and then cut the unarmed woman's throat? I think D'Souza may have overstated it, but I understand what he's saying. If this highly-organized and carefully planned operation had been carried out by SEALs with less crude weaponry in a location far, far away from our country, then it would have been an act of heroic military cunning. If our country is attacked, it's terrorism. If we are the aggressors, it's counter-terrorism, understand? It's the same old ethnocentric megalomania and hypocrisy that passes as patriotism and love of country over here in the greatest country in the world (read: has the most money) and as we all learned from Mr. Show, “More Money = Better Than.”

Maher is impartial and looks at the 9/11 attacks objectively. The only ones who have any right to be upset with him and D'Souza for what they said are those who lost loved ones or their homes or were injured. In their cases, irrational bias is perfectly justified.

Maher's show was cancelled not long after this episode aired. He got a new show on HBO in 2003, Real Time with Bill Maher. Again, HBO veterans united, and now we have Religulous.

Maher is as polarizing a national figure as one will find. Jackass, or the biggest balls in the nation? He's said plenty of things that support the former and plenty of things that support the latter. The man essentially demands an opinion. Just one look at a picture of his smug face and snide expression elicits a strong reaction.


Mine used to be that he was a jackass, but now, after watching two of his HBO comedy specials and watching select episodes of Real Time and old episodes of Politically Incorrect, and seeing his unapologetic attitude of contempt for the American public, often saying things so wildly contrarian, that there must be an inkling of calculated offense in them, I’ve decided that the man has balls. Balls in the way Sacha Baron Cohen had balls, stepping into the lion’s den of hostile provincialism and slathering himself in barbecue sauce and offering baiting commentary like so much bloody pork, his whole being a walking bait just begging to brave situations of unthinkable social awkwardness, situations which had me cowering behind my fingers out of embarrassment and discomfort while Cohen boldly, self-destructively charged into the fray. I doubt Maher will come close to that, but from the trailers, it looks like he is very conscious of his director’s previous documentary/social commentary/comedy of manners/assault on propriety/stunt and must do his best to meet its challenge. If anybody’s up to the task, it’s Maher. We shall see on October 3.

Michelangelo Antonioni's L’avventura (1960)

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) is one of my most favorite films, exploring the incompatibility of the primal elements of nature with human beings, specifically human beings who think they have civilized the inhospitable by maintaining a rigorously prim lifestyle of corsets, frocks, and immaculate white lace dresses. Mrs. Appleyard’s Victorian-fashioned girls’ school plants their field trip in the muggy, buzzing mosslands of Hanging Rock, certain their propriety and neck-to-ankle-length dresses will ward off the wilderness. For the school’s presumption, three of the girls vanish, to god knows where, seemingly swallowed into the earth.

Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura’s premise is identical, but serving different purposes: a group of Italian bourgeoisie out yachting find themselves drawn to a poker-faced landmass, an island, whose features are often shot to accentuate their permanence as compared to the dwarfed ephemera of the tourists. Whereas the Rock in Weir’s film evoked a more actively malevolent presence, the rocks and quarries on the anonymous island in Antonioni’s film are indifferent to the visitors, though the indifference is frighteningly implacable, and accompanied by the ever-present sound of the wind, the island begins to give the impression that it is harboring secrets. One of those secrets is the whereabouts of Anna (Lea Massari), ostensibly the lead female character in the film – she is introduced to us before anyone else (the film opens with Anna persuading her father not to worry about the yachting excursion). Anna’s boyfriend or fiancée, Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), and her best friend, Claudia (Monica Vitti), join her on the trip, as well as some other friends.

Anna comes from a wealthy family, is spoiled, and jaded in a petulant sort of way that renders her dissipated restlessness more unlikable than the others, who, granted, are as listless and idle as she, though without the nasty attitude. These people have nothing to do and nowhere to go: ennui hangs over them all as darkly as the uniform cloud that shudders quietly over the island as they idle on land. Anna, so bored she has begun to play irresponsible tricks on her friends and loved ones by claiming to have come within proximity of a shark, seems to be asking for it, and indeed, It answers, and she abruptly disappears, triggering the alarm of her fellow island-loiterers, who then search for her earnestly and without results. It appears her dissipation was more profound than it appeared.

Whether the disappearance is literal or not can be puzzled over for hours – the whole film presents itself in a protracted state of meditative aimlessness, saying nothing, revealing nothing, doing nothing, really, but at the same time, expressing everything.

Some audiences don’t like to fill in the blanks provided by a film, but what is art if not a communication of sensibilities? How is the art to linger in the crevices of your brain if you’ve solved it, know it top to bottom, understand it thoroughly? Film is a medium that is too often used as vulgar diversion, and not enough as a means of refinement. How is one to hear God without silence and stillness (the two things American audiences find utterly anathema when sitting down to watch a movie)?

One might say, after watching Claudia guiltily succumb to Sandro’s affections only to see him cheating on her with a prostitute late in the film, that the disappearance of Anna earlier was not literal, but symbolic of the manner in which men and women, after growing tired with their current lover, lose sight of them. I think the mystery is part of the fascination of Antonioni’s film, a haunting hypothesis that the more insolent a person is in broadcasting their dissatisfaction, how bored they are by existence, the sooner existence will let them know how bored it is of them.


Grade: A+