Friday, February 1, 2008

The shattering Romanian movie "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" is not for the faint of heart -- or the garden-variety filmgoer expecting the kind of safe, predictable genre exercise that passes for drama in the American multiplex.

But for film connoisseurs who are passionately interested in how far the medium can go in depicting human stories with realism at its most confrontational and even discomfiting, "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" will provide a bracing breath of fresh cinematic air. Anamaria Marinca delivers an utterly transfixing performance as Otilia, a young woman who helps a friend (Laura Vasiliu) obtain an illegal abortion in the waning days of Romania's communist Ceausescu regime. Writer-director Cristian Mungiu films Otilia's harrowing day in virtual real time, recording every scene in one long, unbroken take.

The result is a sobering, at times deeply unsettling portrait of the extremes people must resort to under tyranny, a portrait all the more powerful because of Mungiu's adamant refusal to gloss over unpleasant truths. When he shows the aftermath of the termination (the title refers to the pregnancy's term), the image is at once shocking and courageous, mournful and accusatory of the regime that made such extremes necessary. The movie stands in stark contrast to an American film culture in a thrall to such cutesy fictions as "Knocked Up" and "Juno." For a real doodle that can't be undid -- and one put in a very real and relevant historical context -- Mungiu has given us the right, real thing.

-- Ann Hornaday

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days Unrated, 113 minutes Contains profanity, brief nudity and adult situations, including a graphic depiction of an abortion. At Landmark's E Street Cinema. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days Unrated, 113 minutes Contains profanity, brief nudity and adult situations, including a graphic depiction of an abortion. At Landmark's E Street Cinema.