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Author
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Topic: 4 Months, Three Weeks, 2 Days
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Gerard S. Cohen
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 975
From: Forest Hills, NY, USA
Registered: Sep 2001
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posted 02-10-2008 03:44 PM
This is a long, slow-moving and grim film of an event set in Romania in 1987.
B A C K S T O R Y
In "Communist" Romania, Nicolai and Elena Ceaucescu, in order to halt the rapid decline in population, prevented emmigration, banned family planning clinics and contraception, and outlawed abortions, decreeing heavy jail sentences for violators. People were less inclined to raise families anyway, because of the enforced hunger and poverty, which led to thousands of unwanted babies housed in state-run "orphanages."
WARNING; S P O I L E R S A H E A D !
The film follows a pregnant student who enlists the help of her roommate in an attempt to undergo a clandestine, illegal abortion. The time is two years before the anti-communist revolution, and the film is drab in color and lighting, revealing well the squalor of life in its depiction of dormitories, hallways, hotel rooms, streets and alleys. Creepy night scenes of dark alleys and unlit staircases add a film noir effect, and the sometimes hand-held camera films in real time.
What the film is really about, is how a people has been made to live in fear, by internalizing repression in each individual. Unlike the German "Lives of Others" where the Stassi police are ever-present (their microphones and an agent are concealed in the protagonist's very apartment), in this scenario the police are almost never shown, yet fear is ever-present.
The corupt leadership breeds corruption and distrust into every relationship, and the best scenes are confrontational, between the lovers, and between the victims and the perverted abortionist.
While the film (the title apparently reveals the gestational age of the fetus) garnered the Palme d'Or at Cannes,
where the photography was praised, only one shot really unnerved me. A tight medium group shot was held throughout a family birthday dinner, with an intensely anxious young woman squeezed between men at one end of the table, where the guests, mostly professional middle-class Romanians, babble on with the most banal trivia of the foods they remember from their childhoods.
Even the professional class has been dumbed down by the impoverished times. I found this scene most painful, as the tight suffocating shot was held for what seemed eternity.
The film ended without an "ending," merely a blank screen and a long pause before the credits rolled.
This film is one of a new wave of young directors coming to grips with some of the soul-destroying realities of recent history. It is intensely realistic, and this viewer empathized
with the actors to the point of not being able to let go of the film for days afterward.
Viewed at the Kew Forest Cinema, screen 2, Sat., Feb. 9 at 4:15 PM Audience 30, mostly seniors.
[ 02-11-2008, 12:24 PM: Message edited by: Gerard S. Cohen ]
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