The Romanian film, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days’, won this years’ Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival. Written and directed by Romanian filmmaker Cristin Mungui, charts the course of a crisis time in the lives of two University girlfriends, friendship, Gabita and Otilia.
The friends have taken a room in a grimy city hotel so that Gabita can have an illegal abortion. As the title suggests Gabita is 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days pregnant. Gabita can’t handle the scandal that would arise if she were to have a baby without having a partner in Romania’s repressive communist regime. Fortunately, she has her best friend Otilia to lean on and support her through the ordeal.
Mungan’s film authentically takes the audience into Gabita’s and Otilia’s grim, survival world. The women were just focused on getting through the ordeal and returning their lives to normality. ‘4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days’ captures the urgency of the two women…their fateful meeting with a dodgy, ice-cold abortionist after favours, and the trickiness and primitiveness of the procedure.
The performances of the two leads were great: Laura Vasiliu played Gabita and Anamaria Marincu played Otilia.
(C) David Kary
