4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS (Cristian Mungiu, 2007)

One needs to know before seeing 4 luni, 3 saptamani si 2 zile what Romanians themselves know: that abortion (as well as the use of contraception) was illegal in Romania in 1987, during the Communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu, who wished to maximize his country’s population, but it became legal shortly after revolution deposed (and executed) Ceauşescu in 1989, since which time abortion has become the primary form of birth control in Romania, where 70% of pregnancies end in abortion. Facts are of course open to interpretation, but the possibility exists that Romanian women, feeling that their lives were too long put on hold, now apply to abortion as a means of either pursuing unimpeded career paths or, simply, expressing their freedom, a cornerstone of which, in Romania as elsewhere, is the free exercise of reproductive rights. The point I am making presses: Most reviewers have confined their understanding of writer-director Cristian Mungiu’s film to the time in which it is set, 1987, ignoring the greater interest that arises when it is also seen as a reflection on the present.
     This moody and stinging film takes an unexpected protagonist: not Gabita, the girl seeking an abortion, but her college roommate, Otilia, who takes over the black market arrangement as Gabita collapses into passivity, a reflection, perhaps, of her lack of political self-determination. A local reviewer, castigating the film, thus opines that “the motivations of the heroine are . . . implausibly selfless.” But they aren’t “selfless”; rather, they are unselfishly committed since Otilia knows that she is in the same political boat as her roommate, and the next time she herself may be in the hot seat. Indeed, the film includes a disturbing look at Otilia’s relationship with her boyfriend, Adi, who isn’t too sure, even, when Otilia normally has her period and who ignored her plea not to penetrate and come when they were recently in bed together. At least in Otilia’s view, this “mama’s boy” is all in love with her for the moment, heedless of what could prove the consequences for her of their sexual relationship. One of their quarrels hits this impasse: he argues that the fact that she isn’t pregnant like Gabita is all that matters; she thinks—and, yes, from the context we know what Otilia thinks—that it also matters that she could become pregnant. Adi wants what he wants when he wants it; beneath his soft mask, he is a pathetic little despot.
     Mr. Bebe, the back-alley abortionist who extracts sexual favors in addition to an exhorbitant fee and treats clients as though they were prostitutes and he were their pimp, is without doubt a grotesque version of Adi—the version that lets the determining gender politics hang out. Bebe is the mirror in which we see the sense of male entitlement that motivates Adi as well. Bebe is the film’s most explosive personality—a reflection of what seediness and cruel exploitation become rampant when society doesn’t hitch its soul to the ideas of women’s equality of women’s rights. Reacting recklessly to the restrictions imposed on them under Ceauşescu, Romanian women, Mungiu may be saying, still are less than free, but wedded now to the illusion of freedom in a nation where male bias is supported by the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches.
     Otilia’s frantic involvement in her roommate Gabita’s cause, which includes a descent into the bowels of the night in order to dispose of Gabita’s aborted fetus, is harrowing, to say the least. Regrettably, a bit of her running around reminded this viewer of an entirely superficial film: Tom Tykwer’s Lola Rennt (1998). There is also a laboriously directed stretch at Adi’s mother’s birthday party dinner that rings false. Otherwise, this is a gripping piece of work—and the long-held shot of the hotel bathroom floor on which the bloody aborted fetus appears in the foreground, challenging our eyes to look elsewhere in the frame, both bristles and staggers. Abortions should be clean, unlike the illegal one in this film. And even cleans ones ought not substitute for responsible birth control. But the choice has to be the woman’s; a woman must have the right to fix the destiny of her own body. Anything less is warped and inhuman.
     Sergei M. Eisenstein, let me remind you, argued in The Old and the New (1929) that gender equality was essential for the prospects of the Soviet Union. That nation chose instead to fit its old patriarchic Russian hand in the new Bolshevik glove. It’s hard to determine all that went wrong with the U.S.S.R., but the Eisenstein film brims and spills over with such heartfelt clarity and hope—as if from another world.
     Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days took the Palme d’Or, the world’s most prestigious film prize, at Cannes.

KOLJA (Jan Sverák, 1996)

Interruption is the main motif of Kolja, from the Czech Republic; the idea of discontinuity provides the film, written by and starring Zdenek Sverák and directed by his son, Jan, with its principal continuity. There are numerous instances of interruption in 55-year-old František Louka’s life—for instance: the boot he gets from the state orchestra in 1988 Czechoslovakia as a result of an imprudent remark, casting him into poverty; the acquisition of a five-year-old stepson, Kolja, when he marries the child’s Russian mother for money so that she can become a Czech citizen and not have to return to Soviet Russia, whereupon she leaves for her lover, abandoning the child—an interruption in two stages of his bachelorhood (and a third, since the boy arrives at his doorstep when he is in the middle of having sex); Kolja’s ironical delight when he hears his native language being spoken outside, whereupon he descends upon Soviet soldiers, interrupting their work; and so forth. But thematically containing a score of these interruptions are two national interruptions of Czech destiny: the Soviet occupation; the end to this once the Soviet Union itself comes to an end—the interruption of an interruption.
     All this may make Kolja sound like an interesting film. It isn’t. The upward trajectory of Franta’s life as he warms up to the child, who can speak only Russian, and acquires, besides, a soul-mate (putting an end to his sexually carefree life and its attendant loneliness), makes for a sentimental, silly film. Some praise Jan Sverák’s “irreverent” humor around the edges, but the center of his film is a marshmallow. Kolja isn’t indigestible, but it induces diarrhea.
     Certainly the Oscar-winning film isn’t trash. Instead, it is mediocre and borderline maudlin—and, of course, little Kolja is interminably cute.

LIFE IS A BED OF ROSES (Alain Resnais, 1983)

Three time-frames infiltrate one another; three stories interlock—and a fourth, medieval story is contained in the contemporary story as an expression of children’s imagination. Alain Resnais’s La vie est un roman—literally, Life Is a Romance, but in the States, Life Is a Bed of Roses—is all about imagination: imagining a royal estate, imagining a utopian society that’s also expressionistic and solipsistic, imagining two persons in bed contrary to what appears to be their natural paths of sexual interest. There’s something of a Shakespearean fairy-tale air hanging about, and much of the film is (monotonously) punctuated by original choral music. Jean Gruault wrote the script, perhaps on a whim.
     A lifetime ago my brother described a particular Resnais film as “sheer pleasure,” and that sums up what Resnais films generally have been for me. Watching this one, though, bored me stiff. Early on there’s a visual and contextual coup, and I had a foreboding things were going to go badly when it registered for me as mere cleverness. Just prior to the outbreak of the Great War, a count unveils outdoors a model for the castle he intends to have built. Darkness and flames soon after become the backdrop for the model: war has erupted, engulfing Europe and putting on hold its aristocratic dreams, which will have to reinvent or reconfigure themselves in order to survive (see Jean Renoir’s La grande illusion, 1937). This is amazing stuff, with the model baldly announcing itself as a movie miniature, thus calling attention to its own artifice, illusion and superficiality in a mentally gymnastic, postmodern way. My mind spoke to me: “This is delightful”; but I wasn’t delighted. Rather, I was vaguely annoyed, and as the film proceeded my annoyance continued and deepened.
     Rather than intellectual, this film comes off as overly intellectualized, and it wastes a lot of good actors in uninteresting roles.