4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

Rating:

* * * * *

Verdict:

An unsentimental, uncompromising and angry masterpiece with not a trace of preachiness.

Tough-minded and hard-hitting, this Romanian drama, Cannes' supreme award winner last year, is a masterful work of quiet but incandescent rage.

It's the story of an illegal abortion, which it locates precisely: in 1987, two years before the overthrow of  Ceausescu, who in a mad population drive banned contraception

and

abortion in 1966. But  it is a universal drama, haunting and unsentimental: it distills the whole  grimy sickening injustice into a singular story   with characters of irresistible plausibility, rather than mouthpieces for a polemic.

In essence, it's a thriller,  but it gives us real, flesh-and-blood humans, rather than stereotypes or archetypes. It is  also   the most supremely accomplished piece of filmmaking I've seen in ages.

Director Mingiu, who wrote the spellbindingly naturalistic script, has cannily not made Gabita (Vasiliu), the woman having the termination, his main character: Otilia (the inexpressibly superb Marinca), as the friend helping her, becomes the viewer's surrogate and witness.

Eschewing cheap shock tactics, Mingiu maintains the tension by letting key information out bit by bit - it takes many minutes before it's plain what the two women are up to (it's disclosed here only because a subject warning is warranted, and it's not a spoiler anyway). We see Gabita at home packing a bag with items including a plastic tablecloth and we don't know why. We see her flatmate Otilia trying to book a room in a cheap hotel where they will meet the abortionist (Ivanov, chilling)  and we also don't know why. But in the unsmiling, off-hand treatment she gets from the desk clerk we witness the corrosion of human relations in a totalitarian society which is the film's most powerful thematic undercurrent.

Gabita doesn't know - or pretends not to - how far along she is (though the title has told us) and this is no small matter - abortion after 12 weeks' gestation is legally classified as murder, Bebe tells her when he turns up. That costs more. What unfolds should not be disclosed here, but it's enough to say  Bebe is a man whose moral compass stopped working long ago and  this soon turns into a film about whether friendship can endure anything.

Mingiu shoots in long, uninterrupted takes either with a handheld camera that tracks the action or a stationary one which has actors move in and out of frame. There is one shot, several minutes long  with Otilia's motionless, unspeaking face at the centre of it, which is screen acting of the most extraordinary skill.

This is a hard watch. But it is also a masterpiece, one of the great films of the year.

Peter Calder

Cast:

Anamaria Marinca, Laura Vasiliu, Vlad Ivanov

Director:

Cristian Mungiu

Running time:

113 minutes

Rating:

R16 (nudity, content that may disturb)

Screening:

Rialto

Language:

Romanian with English subtitles