Cinema Styles: Women’s rights are human rights in this film
Note: This review is part of our legacy series. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days celebrates its 15th anniversary this year.
Fifteen year ago, a relatively unknown Romanian filmmaker named Cristian Mungui won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in France. His film, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days struck a chord with audiences as it told the bleak and powerful story of a woman assisting her friend in arranging an illegal abortion in Romania in 1987. While specific to a time and place, the film’s focus on the importance of bodily autonomy is universal and applicable to all individuals.
Nicolae Ceau escu was Romania’s dictator from 1974-1989. Under his communist regime, birth control was illegal and abortion was a crime punishable by death. This film sees Gabita (Vasiliu), a young woman with an unwanted pregnancy seeking help from her tenacious roommate Otilia (Marinca) to find someone who will help to terminate the pregnancy: an unsettling man named Bebe. If caught, all three of them would be killed by their repressive government.
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is a bleak and hyper-realistic film. It’s not an easy watch, but it’s an important one. It’s brutally intense and minimalistic in its approach. With important issues like government control over one’s own body, this film confronts viewers and challenges them constantly. It’s unwavering in its mission to depict all the events objectively and unsparingly. There are hard truths at play in this film, and deeply complex emotional intricacies.
The story is told like a thriller from Alfred Hitchcock, the characters constantly in danger of being caught for what they’re doing. The shrinking numbers of the title, from 4 to 3 to 2 indicates a countdown of sorts, showing time is indeed running out for the main characters. The longer they wait, the more dangerous their objective becomes.
During Ceau escu’s dictatorship, more than 500,000 women died due to the unsafe methods they had to resort to in order to end their pregnancies. After all, making abortions illegal doesn’t stop abortions from happening. It merely stops safe abortions from happening.
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is an incessantly honest and nightmarish film that serves as both a history lesson and a cautionary tale of what government-sponsored restriction of bodily autonomy can lead to. It’s a biting critique of a society that makes it illegal for women to make decisions about their own bodies.
This film is held together by the two central performances from Anamaria Marinca and Laura Vasiliu. They both bring painstaking authenticity to the film’s depiction of two individuals trying to escape a dangerous situation. Their support of one another is an inspiring tribute to the way women often have to hold each other up, especially in a patriarchal society intent on restricting them at every turn.
This movie is also notable for the style of its cinematography, led by director of photography Oleg Mutu. This film utilizes long takes for the majority of its scenes. This places the audience in the moment with the characters, highlighting their emotional turmoil as events transpire in real-time. It fixes an unblinking gaze on the situation, forcing the viewer to reckon with the full impact of what’s happening. The camera frame often leaves out certain details, indicating the movie itself is but one piece of the bigger picture.
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is a film about personal and national trauma. When a government restricts its citizens from making decisions about their own bodies, it of course affects the individuals involved, but it also proves damaging to the entire country. If freedom of one’s own body is stripped away, what good is any other freedom? A society can’t claim to be free if it restricts half of its population. This movie focuses on a specific story of two women, but it has bigger implications about what it means to be free and the risks some people will take when their freedom is made illegal.
Bobby Styles studied Film at UCLA, and worked as an editor and producer on several film, commercial, and music video projects in Los Angeles. He currently teaches the intermediate and advanced Video Production courses in the Multimedia & Technology Academy at Monache High School. His column appears in The Recorder every Tuesday.