'4 Months, 3 Week and 2 Days'

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BY JAN STUART | jan.stuart@newsday.com

January 25, 2008

A cigarette burns on a table in the opening and closing scenes of "4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days." There is so much smoking in Cristian Mungiu's harrowing and heart-stopping drama; more precisely, there is the sense of smoking. When characters are not lighting up or waving cigarettes in the air, they are scouting about dorm rooms and bootleg joints looking for packs to give, trade or use for bribes.

These are the final years of Nicolae Ceausescu's repressive, 24-year regime, when smoking was the opiate of the Romanian masses. Buildings crumble from neglect and disrepair. Kitchen stove gas shuts down at 8 p.m. Tired fluorescent lights flicker ominously. Bribery rules. The only system that functions with any reliability is the omnipresent black market.

This is not an environment to engender confidence in the luckless Romanian woman who needs an abortion, a procedure that was made illegal in that communist country in 1966. When a university polytechnic student named Otilia (the riveting Anamaria Marinca) agrees to help her roommate Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) get an abortion through a black market abortionist, they tumble into a dark and ugly rabbit hole that Lewis Carroll or Kafka, in their chilliest imaginings, would be hard-pressed to fathom.

Though Gabita is the one needing the abortion, Mungiu focuses on the tense figure of Otilia, who has been saddled with the dirty work. It is Otilia who must wrestle with rude and corrupt hotel desk clerks to secure a room for the illegal procedure, and it is Otilia who eventually will have to dispose of the fetus. (The film's terse, heartbreaking title refers to the age of the fetus at the time of termination.)

And it is Otilia who is elected to track down Bebe, a scurvy abortionist who intimidates the women into having sex with him in exchange for his services. Bebe is a wolf in family-guy clothing - if he were around 20 years later he'd be peddling subprime mortgages to the indigent - and Vlad Ivanov invests the character with a poker-faced unctuousness that takes the breath away.

The women's hotel-room encounter with Bebe is the film's tightly coiled centerpiece; Mungiu records every nasty curve and twist with a clinical, unblinking gaze that dares us to exhale. There is inspiration as well in the film's cinéma vérité curtain raiser, which uses ingenious short strokes to paint a miniature of Bucharest life that has the effect of telling everything one needs to know about Romania before the fall of communism. Mungiu also skewers the bourgeois class in a tour-de-force dinner-table sequence in which Otilia attends a birthday dinner for her boyfriend's mother and gets a depressing earful.

Mungiu takes us on a tough ride, but a transfixing one. The sad, widescreen images of cinematographer Oleg Mutu ("The Death of Mr. Lazarescu") are indelible, and demand to be viewed in a theater. Like cigarette smoke that gets into your clothes and upholstery, "4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days" is a devil to scrub out.

4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS (unrated). 2007's Palme d'Or winner at Cannes was Cristian Mungiu's unforgettable drama of a university student in 1987 Romania who helps her roommate arrange an illegal abortion. Anamaria Marinca and Vlad Ivanov give stunning performances. 1:53 (graphic and disturbing images, nudity, language). In Romanian with subtitles. At Lincoln Plaza and IFC Center, Manhattan; coming soon to Huntington's Cinema Arts Centre.

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