Film

The Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is a social problem drama that often feels like a horror movie. Romanian movies got a boost in attention a couple of years ago when The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, an epic-length account of a sick, increasingly comatose old man’s voyage through the medical bureaucracy, became one of the success stories of the 2005 Cannes Film Festival. Though less formally audacious than Mr. Lazarescu, 4 Months is the better movie, with a powerful directness that can take a viewer’s breath away.

Written and directed by Cristian Mungiu, it’s a simple story: in 1987, a pregnant college student named Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) arranged to have an illegal abortion and, accompanied by her friend Otilia (Anamaria Marinca), sets out for the distant hotel room where she is to meet the abortionist (played by Vlad Ivanov). Abortion was outlawed in Romania in 1966, under orders from the Ceausescu regime. The movie is set during one day in a wintry 1987—just two years before the dictator was captured (and summarily executed) trying to flee the country after a coup.

Another recent Romanian film with a title that suggests a diary heading, 12:08 East Of Bucharest, depicts a local shoestring TV panel show where the guests discuss the 1989 revolution, fumbling and disagreeing with each other and ultimately bickering with people who phone in to challenge their memories of what happened. The movie is funny for the dryness of its approach to what should have been a thrilling moment in history—reduced, years later, to the petty bickering of people who seem to get on each other’s nerves more than Ceausescu ever did. You see some of that dryness in Mungiu’s portrait of a police state that is drabber and more colorless than any movie dictatorship you’ve ever seen. The people in it may not know that the government is crumbling from within and has only a couple more years to live, but they’re just going about their business. Their world only seems scary when they’re doing something they shouldn’t and things don’t go smoothly—and then, suddenly, it’s terrifying.

The central character turns out to be Otilia, the girl who’s just along for the ride to lend “moral support” to her friend. This turns out to mean that she’s the one who has to placate the scary, all-business abortionist when he decides that the girls haven’t brought enough money. She’s also the one who has to wander out alone into the night, in a strange city, to dispose of the fetus. (“You’ll bury it, won’t you?” Gabita asks. The abortionist’s best advice is to find a building in a bad part of town, go inside, and toss it off a roof.) In between these chores, she has to hook up with her boyfriend at his parents’ apartment, where she gets roped into making an appearance at a noisy, happy family dinner. The way Mungiu and his gifted inematographer, Oleg Mutu (who also shot The Death of Mr. Lazarescu) stage and shoot this scene, with Otlilia crammed miserably in the center of the frame while the others at the table crowd in on her, shows a special genius for conveying the way that everyday life can get on your last nerve when you’re preoccupied with something enormous that you can’t reveal.

Anamaria Marinca’s remarkable performance gives the movie its human center. In the scene where she works out a deal with the abortionist, she too is all business, but as the action grinds on, her emotional scars become more visible. Whatever you think about abortion, 4 Months does a fairly devastating job of making the case for the reasons why the procedure ought to be legally available. (And the movie, by focusing on Otilia, the girl who’s there to help, rather than Gabita, the girl with the problem, makes it clear that it ought to be an issue of interest to everybody.)

Abortion was quickly legalized after Ceausescu’s death, and soon Romania was leading Europe in the number of abortions being performed. Mungiu himself sees that as evidence that denying abortion as an option makes people think about it more callously, not less: “In that context,” he writes of a society where illegal botched abortions may have killed more than 500,000 in 15 years, “abortion lost any moral connotation and was rather perceived as an act of rebellion and resistance against the regime.” As a director, Mungiu succeeds at making something rare: a harrowing movie that inspires you to think.

Julien Temple’s documentary Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten isn’t as flashy or as fiery as his Sex Pistols film The Filth And The Fury, and at more than two hours it could stand to lose some of its interview footage of celebrities paying tribute to Strummer’s place in the brotherhood of cool. But it has a clear, strong emotional pulse Temple was a friend of Strummer’s, and he wants him to be remembered not just as a father of punk but as a good guy.

Part of what’s touching about the film is that it gives you a strong sense of Strummer’s confusion when he was leading what was, for a minute there, the greatest rock band in the world (the Clash, that is). Strummer started out as a busking hippie, and one reason the Clash self-destructed may have been that he couldn’t just focus on the music he thought it was important that he figure out just what being a “punk” meant, and that he act it out as a supreme role model—a role that moved him to waste a lot of time saying things like, “Hippies should just shove off!” It took a long time out of the spotlight for him to straighten out his head. The movie is threaded through with audio clips of Strummer playing the music he loved—everything from Dylan to the Ramones to Otis Redding to Nina Simone singing the Bee Gees—and it ends with him playing live with his last band the Mescaleros, making it clear that he and his inner hippie had finally made peace with each other. The movie leaves you with a sad smile on your face, because it shows that at the end, all too briefly, Joe Strummer became a happy man.