STUDIO: The Weinstein Company
RELEASE DATE: June 10, 2008
STARRING: Anamaria Marinca, Laura Vasiliu, and Vlad Ivanov
WRITTEN BY: Cristian Mungiu
DIRECTED BY: Cristian Mungiu
FEATURES: "1 Month with 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days"
An Interview with Writer/Director/Producer Cristian Mungiu
An Interview with Cinematographer Oleg Mutu

Critics often throw around the word "haunting" to describe memorable films. Like "masterpiece", "brilliant", and "Hitchcockian", it's an overused bit of praise and often misleading. What exactly does it mean? Can a pretty picture be just as "haunting" as a tragic death? I'm haunted by several images from the last few years, usually from depressing, dark films. (You won't often see the word used to describe the work of Mike Myers.) It may be overused but what it does get to the heart of is that there's still an undefinable power that some celluloid has to burn itself into your mind's eye. And yet, the word somehow doesn't seem adequate for as powerful a film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days. This one doesn't come back to you with pleasant, "wasn't that a good movie" energy like, say, some of Roger Deakins' imagery from No Country For Old Men or Assassination of Jesse James. No, I find myself thinking about 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days like I do a recent tragedy. An image, usually either the same controversially horrifying one that made such a stir or the final, chilling look of the film, will come to me and, no joke, impact my mood for a little while. That's how strongly 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days can lodge itself in your memory. It's a movie that you will think is good on watching on it, great the next day, and a movie you still won't be able to shake months later.

Don't just take my word for it. Despite notoriously getting dissed from the Oscar short list for Best Foreign Language Film (turning an already ridiculed category into more of an international joke), 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days won the Palme D'Or at Cannes and was named best foreign film of the year by the National Association of Film Critics, the Los Angeles Film Critics, and the Chicago Film Critics (a group that I happen to be a part of and, I can tell you without knowing for sure, I think it was a landslide). A.O. Scott of The New York Times named it the best film of the year and the movie continued to impact audiences and critics throughout the early part of this year. As I said when I reviewed it in theaters, "It's daring, challenging, and hard to take, but it's a story that should be told and very few filmmakers could have possibly told it this well." I like it even more now than I did then, when I questioned how blunt and realistic Mungiu decided to be. My inability to shake the film half a year later is why.

If you're unfamiliar, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days refers to the amount of time that Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) has been pregnant until the day she goes with a friend to get an abortion, something that's not too easy in Romania in the 1980s. The class divide at this time, which has been ironically referred to as "The Golden Age", was as wide as you could imagine. Girls weren't allowed to use contraception or get abortions, which led to an insanely profitable and dangerous black market for abortions. At the same time, the rich got richer. Mungiu graphically tells the story of Gabita and her friend Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) and their encounter with an abortionist at a hotel on one sad evening. He brilliantly peppers his screenplay with references to the class structure. A scene where Otilia has to endure obnoxious chit-chat at a dinner table while her friend may be actually dying is remarkable in its understanding of how so many people in this world talk and talk about things that they'll never truly understand and a wedding party going on in the background of the final scenes further illustrates what's happening while the rich sing and dance. But Mungiu isn't making a preachy piece. He often chooses not to move his camera at all, making you, the audience, just another person in a room that you'll want to leave, but can't. And then when he directly addresses the impression that we're "with" these characters in his final shot, it's one of the most memorable in a long time.

Now that 4 Months is on DVD, it has the potential to reach a much wider audience than it did during its arthouse run earlier this year. It's not a date movie. It's not a pleasant experience. But how many films have you seen lately that can truly shake you? This one can. Don't miss it.