READ MORE: Director Cristian Mungiu Q&A

GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 1/17/08)

Cristian Mungiu's picture, set in 1987 Romania and centering on the efforts of two female students to procure a pregnancy termination for one of them, is a remarkably engrossing and thoughtful picture, beautifully rendered in an artful mode of realism.

It's an often bleak and sometimes mordantly humorous picture, and the first of its many ironies is that it's set during what Romania's then-dictator Nicolai Ceaucescu termed his country's "epoca de aur" — its golden age. More like an eternal night, interiors lit by harsh fluorescents exclusively; this is a world where the only pleasure available, it seems, is in chain-smoking. It's a world in which abortion is illegal, and providers of the procedure are even worse in some ways than the back alley medicos of a bygone era in our own history. The journey of the picture's protagonists is often harrowing and sometimes thriller-caliber suspenseful.

Although many of the critical notices on the picture have focused on its "social problem" aspect — which does of course exist, and is well articulated — for me 4 Months really hits home as a character study. It may come as a surprise to some that the character in question is not the young woman actually procuring the abortion — the dim and sometimes passive-to-the-point-of-bovinity Gabita (Laura Vasiliu, who manages to convey those qualities quite acutely without alienating the viewer). Rather, it's her friend and roommate Otilia who almost defiantly suffers all manner of humiliation and frustration trying to help a woman with whom she seems to have little natural affinity. It's a marathon performance by Anamaria Marinca, on a level with, say, Sandrine Bonnaire in Varda's Vagabond.

There's a bit of a scandal brewing over the fact that this outstanding picture did not even make it to the short list of Oscar nominees for Best Foreign Film. In point of fact, the howls of protest greeting the snub can only be good for the picture, which richly deserves all the good publicity it can get.

— Glenn Kenny