CINEMATIC Review

4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS   ***

Cristian Mungiu

2007

 IDEA:   A woman enlists her friend to assist her with an illegal abortion in the Communist Romania of the 1980s.

BLURB:   A haunted and paranoid mood piece scored to the deadening static of silence, interspersed with stifled cries of desperation and candid misery spread out over inert frames. The ambient, stagnant panic works, even if it takes a while to fully sink under your skin. Yet you sit there, can’t help but wondering why certain scenes need to be held as long as they are, why there couldn’t be an edit here, or a cut there, or dialogue snipped there. The most listless scenes are something in the realm of being catatonic. But for such carefully building anxiety and subdued, unnerving distress – pain released as if leaking through a pinhole – there isn’t anything quite like it. What becomes of such seemingly indulgent dormancy is actually pretty effective; a disquieting metaphor for relational disappointment, impending responsibility, and life in an emotional vortex where even the people you most trust become most distant.