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Post by Return of the Thin Olive Duke on Mar 31, 2016 0:23:19 GMT -5
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days Dir. Christian Mungiu Premiered at Cannes May 17, 2007
The day before I was born, Nicolae Ceausescu appeared outside his massive, newly constructed capitol to speak to the people, only for them to laugh him out of office. The Army abandoned him, cutting the hammer and sickle from the flag by hand. Ceausescu and his wife barricaded themselves in the Presidential palace for eight days, only to be shot in the back in the courtyard. East Germans may yearn for a lost era of state-owned pickles, and Russians may curse Gorbachev and worship Stalin, but you will find no such fondness in Romania today.
Only two years earlier, an end to Ceausescu’s unique brand of Communism was a distant fantasy, as shown in 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, the first installment in Christian Mungiu’s ironically named “Memories from the Golden Age.”
It’s a winter day in 1987. Romania is a prison. Although a far cry from the 1950s– middle-class professionals can feed their children now!– the country is dying. In public places, the lights constantly flicker and burn out. Western-made cigarettes and pirated American films are valuable commodities. Everyone wears blue jeans; they’re their most valuable possessions. Birth control is unavailable. Abortion is punishable by years in prison for both doctor and patient– and student Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) is helping her friend and roommate Gabriela (Luminita Gheorghiu) get one. Little does Otilia know that Gabriela is further along in her pregnancy than she let on.
Though simply shot and slow-burning, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, with its subtle hints at a near-collapsed society, is an effortlessly fascinating, almost hypnotic window into a mercifully bygone era. More than anything else, what is captured is the sense of dread experienced when a paranoid government is breathing down your neck, where graduating from college means taking a job without choice, and where you can’t even see where you’re walking at night. It’s no wonder they ended up killing their own President.
Additional Notes - Welcome to Cannes 2007! To close out May, I’ll be profiling three more films from the festival, each very different. But next time, we’ll be taking a detour to another part of Europe.
- Abortion was criminalized in 1966 to boost Romania's fertility rate. In the film, Otilia visits her boyfriend's extended family, where the two of them are the only people of their generation.
- When abortion was legalized again in 1990, the rate skyrocketed– three for every live birth– as did the rate of homeless children. Today, both have gone down by leaps and bounds.
- This movie is curiously relevant today: Republican front-runner Donald Trump suggested that, we're abortion illegal in the United States, doctors and patients would both be punished (though he quickly walked it back). Meanwhile, the US Army is sending a division into Eastern Europe (including Romania), where the fear of Russian invasion is rampant.
Next Time: Once |
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Post by MarkInTexas on Mar 31, 2016 9:27:24 GMT -5
I've always thought the events of the Romanian revolution leading to the Ceausescus' execution would make a fascinating movie or mini-series.
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Post by Return of the Thin Olive Duke on Mar 31, 2016 10:58:50 GMT -5
Journal Entries of the Damned
May 17, 2007
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Post by Sanziana on Apr 1, 2016 12:35:43 GMT -5
I watched this movie with my mother, who was a pediatric nurse all her life and professionally active during those years. I told her that the events in the movie must be embellished, no one would ask sexual favours for abortions (I was young and naive). She told me in reality things were actually worse. Yes, between 1966 and 1989 abortion was illegal, and punishable by up to 2 years in prison. In the 1970s, contraceptives became available but only on prescription, and in 1980 they were banned completely, black market alternatives being mostly obtainable in the west of the country, where they were brought in from Serbia and Hungary. There was a special branch of the police called Procuratura that took care of all matters pertaining to this area. Factory workers were subjected to monthly ob-gyn controls supervised by this police, so pregnant women were spotted and monitored. Doctors weren't allowed to provide care to women coming to hospitals with "suspicious" abortions, they had to report them for fear of prison and wait for the Procuratura to give their approval (usually after an interrogation) to help their patients, even in extreme cases; many women died on operating tables in this way. It is estimated that almost 10000 women died in those 23 years from illegal abortions, and many more became sterile or suffered other injuries. The saddest part is that nobody wants to remember them today, it's all swept under the shame carpet. Add this to the list of genocides against women; it's a pretty long list.
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Post by Return of the Thin Olive Duke on Apr 1, 2016 13:02:16 GMT -5
@zoanois Holy shit. It's not clear in the film how much control the state really has though, as it seemingly can't even repaint buildings or replace lightbulbs. I don't wish to get into political debate here, but it's worth noting that abortion wasn't illegal on moral grounds, but to stop population decline brought on by widespread poverty. I just watched Hotel Rwanda, and Kigali in 1994 looked significantly more affluent than Bucharest in 1987.
Toward the end of Bill Bryson's underrated book Neither Here Nor There, he visits Bulgaria in early 1990, just before it (briefly) re-instated its Communist government. It's not Romania, but what he wrote has always stuck with me because it's a reminder that, after the heartbreak of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, nobody was sure any of the sweeping changes were anything more than temporary.
Curiously, that's almost exactly the same thing my uncle said after he returned from Cuba in December 2014, becoming the last American to visit illegally.
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Post by Sanziana on Apr 1, 2016 14:51:02 GMT -5
Return of the Thin Olive Duke The government didn't repair buildings and replace lightbulbs because all the money went into paying the national debt and building monstrosities like Palace of the Parliament (Casa Poporului in my language). And abortion was illegal to increase the population, but not because poverty brought on population decline.
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Post by Return of the Thin Olive Duke on Apr 1, 2016 16:49:33 GMT -5
Return of the Thin Olive Duke The government didn't repair buildings and replace lightbulbs because all the money went into paying the national debt and building monstrosities like Palace of the Parliament (Casa Poporului in my language). And abortion was illegal to increase the population, but not because poverty brought on population decline. Apologies for the inaccuracy; it was purely my own inference. |
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