Lives in the balance

Gabita (Laura Vasiliu, right) needs the assistance of Otilla (Anamaria Marinca) in getting an abortion in the film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. (Mongrel Media)

A woman needs an abortion, and her friend accompanies her: In that short, plain sentence is one of the most common stories never told. The Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days mines the inherent drama of abortion — a subject rarely represented in cinema — and then uses it to tell another story about life in the twilight of the Ceausescu era, when abortion was illegal. Director Cristian Mungiu has accomplished a double feat: the first curtain he pulls back reveals a cinematic taboo; the second curtain is iron.

“I didn’t intend to make an abortion movie,” says Mungiu in an interview during the Toronto International Film Festival in September. “I wanted to make a very subjective movie about the smaller, personal misfortunes of the communist times without ever specifically mentioning Ceausescu or communism.”

The film won Mungiu, who is only 39, the 2006 Palme d’Or, the top prize at Cannes. His image travelled the globe: a round face perched atop a black bow tie, grim and bewildered, the award seemingly soldered to his hand. It’s hard to imagine Mungiu, an earnest fast-talker (even in his accented English) with big theories about post-communist filmmaking, clinking glasses on the Croisette.

4 Months is the cornerstone of Mungiu’s larger project called Tales from the Golden Age, a series of films that depict what he calls “urban legends” from the communist era, the stories of a recent past that may already be fading from the collective memory. The last line of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days drips with irony: “Let’s never talk about this.”

“I’m almost 40, and I feel the history. I need to put it out there,” says Mungiu.

From 1966 to 1989, the Romanian government made abortion illegal. Mungiu was born into a massive population surge; there were seven other Christians in his first year of school. “There weren’t enough names to go around,” he says dryly. According to Mungiu’s research, 500,000 women died from illegal abortions during that time.

Director Cristian Mungiu. (Steve Carty/CBC)

Fifteen years ago, a female friend told Mungiu her abortion story, and the director claims that the film hews closely to her experience. Two college roommates, living atop one another in a state dorm (even the showers are crowded and uncomfortably public), rent a hotel room for a night. The film unfolds like a thriller; it’s unclear exactly what the students are planning until an abortionist named Mr. Bebe appears. He is a soft-spoken tormenter, toying with the women as the evening passes slowly against the unadorned walls of the hotel room.

“The story always came from a female perspective for me, because that’s how I first heard it,” says Mungiu. “It’s extremely frustrating to hear [about an abortion] because you cannot do anything about it. I was haunted by what this girl told me, and then, by coincidence, I ran into her years later. I decided, it’s time for the story to become public. Maybe the movie helped me to deal with my own impotence, too.”

Mungiu used wide, straight-on shots, sometimes even spinning the camera 360 degrees, to capture every detail of place and time: a plain, grim Romanian small town in 1987. As night falls, the film darkens, and the characters are forced further into the shadows. “During that time, there was not much food and even less electricity,” says Mungiu.

Mungiu’s determination to nudge the memory of his country’s fresh history sounds a lot like the agenda of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, the young director of the Oscar-winning German film The Lives of Others. Though quite different — Others is a spy movie about the East German secret police — the two films both lay bare how regimes affect moral compromise, and how a fierce human spirit answers back. When I mention that film, set in East Berlin just prior to the collapse of the wall, Mungiu is politely dismissive.

“I haven’t seen it,” he says. (This could be true: he claims not to watch movies for a year or two before he shoots his own, so as not to be influenced.) “But it was quite conventional, mmm?” True — Lives of Others is a melodrama, marked by violins and tears. It’s a Hollywood movie in a communist country, and this is not Mungiu’s project.

“I want my movie to appear as if there is no filmmaker behind it,” he says. “I don’t use close-ups or music. I use actors who can memorize pages and pages of dialogue so I don’t have to cut scenes.”

Mungiu writes the script and goes over the text carefully with his actors, acting out each scene himself, tinkering endlessly with the language to make it sound more phonetic and real. He drops letters from words and encourages his actors to talk quietly, even to whisper.

Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov, left) meets Otilia and Gabita in a hotel to perform an illegal abortion. (Mongrel Media)

“I want it to sound completely natural,” he says. “It is a great compliment to me if someone tells me it sounds like [the actors are] talking behind a wall.”

Mungiu worked as a teacher and a journalist before graduating from film school in 1998. One of his short films, Occident, went to Cannes in 2002. He worked for the government drafting Romania’s new film laws, which, he says with a laugh, helped him get state funding for 4 Months.

When Mungiu became a filmmaker — he has made commercials, too — he worked on some international films shot in Romania, including a U.S. production that he won’t name. A quick on-line trip to the IMDB lists Mungiu as first assistant director on a 1998 comedy about a medieval fantasy camp run by androids called Teen Knight. (Reads one audience review: “My only theory is that this movie was some sort of tax write-off...”)

“It’s very good to watch a big film getting made,” says Mungiu. “I learned a lot about what I needed to undo. You need to know the enemy.”

When asked if 4 Months is relevant to the election issue of abortion rights in the United States, where many believe Roe v. Wade is under threat, Mungiu doesn’t bite. “I don’t make the judgments,” he says. “I can only make this subjective film, and people can look at the moral issues. People will draw their own conclusions.”

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days opens in Toronto and Vancouver on Nov. 2, with other Canadian cities to follow.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBCnews.ca.

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