4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days

director: Cristian Mungiu
year: 2007

Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) helps her friend and roommate Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) set up, conduct, and deal with the consequences of an illegal abortion in 1987 Romania.


Cristian Mungiu's Palm d'Or-winning 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days is a beautifully oppressive film about leading burdened lives under a broken, rotting, cracked—but still somewhat functional—ideological roof.

We often complain about not having enough time, about time flying by, or about our lives happening too quickly. But the characters in Mungiu's film suffer from an affliction of the opposite: time crawling, days lasting too long, lives dripping rather than flowing.

Otilia and Gabita are not young women; they only look like young women. Their environment has created a serious disconnect between the aging of their bodies and the aging of their minds. They've lived more than they appear. What Romanian Communism has managed to achieve is a nation of the aged. Even the fetus that Gabita purges from her body is older than it seems.

The toll for this aging is tiredness, apathy, a longing to rest, to sleep—and, vitally, the inability to do so.


But, to step away from time for a moment, what most struck me about the film was Otilia's unwashed hair. I'm not used to unwashed hair. In most films, even people in the most dire circumstances have clean, shiny, soft-looking hair! With the recent wave of Romanian—and, more broadly, East European cinema—critics often talk about an East European aesthetic, something that defines the look of these films. Perhaps unwashed hair is the symbolic representation of this aesthetic: the utter lack of glamour. And, in the worst films, even the glamourization of a lack of glamour!

There's also Mungiu's poignant presentation of friendship. Otilia and Gabita, each her own well-realized character, have a complex relationship that Mungiu and his two actresses construct through situation and acting rather than dialogue. The resulting mesh of looks, reactions, and decisions becomes so thick by the film's end that its pattern illuminates both women as well as what binds them together.


Now, stepping once more into time. Much of 4 Months (even the title draws attention to slowness of time, measuring it in smaller and smaller increments) takes place over one eventful evening. In itself, this is not strange; many films take place over short periods. What sets Mungiu's film apart, however, is that while those other films highlight the extraordinariness of the events they show—to convince us that this long day is the exception, will never happen again, is special and therefore deserves our attention—4 Months highlights its own ordinariness: this will happen again.


When Otilia and Gabita share a late-night meal in a Bucharest hotel in the film's final scene, their reactions are neither triumphant nor conclusive: it's late, they're hungry, they eat. The day was long, but long is normal.

In a way, the whole exhausting film leads up to this final shot. We've seen and experienced everything along with Otilia. Through hand-held shots and long takes, we've been brought into her Romanian reality. And, after everything, we're emotionally, perhaps even physically, drained. But, Otilia is not.

And that's the horrific tragedy of it.

4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days—and we've been sapped by only one evening.

It's at this point that Mungiu lays down his trump card, revealing that what we thought was realism was only ever the illusion of realism:

The same shot of Otilia and Gabita eating. Neither says a word. Gabita reaches for the menu, Otilia pours herself a glass of water. As she raises the glass to her lips...


...two headlights appear, reflected in what we suddenly realize is a large window. Mungiu shifts our entire perspective. We thought we were with Otilia and Gabita, in the same hotel room, sitting at the same table. But, we're not. We're separated by a glass wall. We're outside—and merely looking in.

Although we can see into Otilias's reality, we'll never be able to experience it. It's impossible.

We're tired, she's not.