Smooth Operator

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days' Cristian Mungiu examines his methods of choice.

by Sam Adams

ALL IN A DAYS' WORK: "I [tried] to drop everything that wasn't absolutely necessary," says Mungiu (right). (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Before Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days slid by No Country for Old Men and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly to take the top prize at Cannes, few people outside of his native Romania had ever heard his name. But a year's worth of near-unanimous acclaim has brought the soft-spoken director to the fore.

Vividly dramatizing the horrors endured by two women as they attempt to procure an illegal abortion in the last years of the Ceausescu regime, 4 Months arguably provides ammunition for both sides of the abortion debate. But Mungiu was clearly taken aback by the waves of politicized questions that greeted its first screenings. "In Romania," he says, "there is no issue about abortion. People don't really think about this too much."

Take the politics of abortion out of the equation, and 4 Months is revealed as pro-choice, in the anti-totalitarian sense. Mungiu details how the repression of the state is replicated on an individual level, most notably in a scene in which the women hash out a deal with a black-market abortionist, Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov). His words retain a residual kindness, but when he is threatened he quickly moves to demonstrate who's in charge. "It was very easy for me to imagine that this guy was also screwed by this society, so he was doing like anyone else would in such circumstances," Mungiu says. "Taking advantage whenever he could, and feeling like he's not doing anything wrong because other people are taking advantage of him."

Rather than focus on the unhappily pregnant college student, Mungiu devotes most of his attention to her friend, Otilia (Anamaria Marinca), who negotiates the terms of the procedure. It is Otilia, rather than her friend, who seems most shaken by the movie's events, and most enlightened, as well. "For me," says Mungiu, "he who understands is the main character. People really don't think too much about what happens to them, and they don't necessarily extract something useful from what happened to them. They just make decisions on the spot and see what happens."

Mungiu's scrupulous naturalism, consisting of long takes and an often unmoving camera, was achieved through careful writing and extensive rehearsal. "What I was trying to do is to drop everything that wasn't absolutely necessary for the film, or could look a bit too melodramatic or too staged. So I just tried to keep it as simple as possible," he says. "Simple is very difficult to achieve."

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days opens Friday at Ritz at the Bourse.