4 Months..., 1/23.

"Cristian Mungiu's Palme d'or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days is as good as you've heard - ravaging, provocative, deeply moving, and expertly crafted -but it may not be what you expect," writes Chris Wisniewski at indieWIRE. It's "a tense, riveting thriller (of a sort) that subtly evokes the experiences of women in a society that fiercely regulates their lives and bodies, often reducing them to commodities to be bought, sold, and bartered, no different at the extreme from the Kent cigarettes and orange Tic Tacs traded on the Bucharest black market."

Updated through 1/30.

"For all its long behavioral takes, 4 Months is remarkably unshowy," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "Where [The Death of Mr Lazarescu] was an exceedingly dark comedy, 4 Months is a shockingly matter-of-fact horror film." Then, there's a second part to this piece in which Hoberman looks back on 2007 as "the year of the abortion - or perhaps we should say the abortion-not":

There can be no female agency in Knocked Up, Waitress and Juno - not because they are comedies, but because, in each scenario, unwanted pregnancy is the joke played (by God?) on the female lead. As the most successful of the preg protags, she who is Knocked Up is necessarily the most smacked down - the glass ceiling turns out to be Alison's own uterus. Jenna and Juno are less formidable, but unexpected fertility mocks their dreams of autonomy. All three are taught their place by their own bodies - and what's more, they learn to like it.

[...]

4 Months is too specific to suggest a tract, let alone an allegory. As I said, it's a thriller. In the most visceral sense, this is a movie about living with terror - political and biological. Like Knocked Up and the others, it's set in a world where unwanted pregnancies occur, and legal abortion is not an option.

"There is plenty here to fuel both sides of the abortion debate," writes Anthony Lane before divulging what some might consider a spoiler in his New Yorker review. "Yet this is not an issue movie. We are not being forced to vote, and the characters are defined less by any stated beliefs than by the moral texture of their actions."

"From Italian neorealism onward, every realistic film has been as much about the present as about the past," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. "Hence, as I watched Mr Mungiu's work, I had the feeling that, thanks to its palpable location realism, certain aspects of Romanian life have not become idyllic in the two decades since the removal of the Communist overlords."

Earlier: Cannes, Toronto, New York, LA and 1/16.

Updates, 1/24: "It's momentously drab, obvious and guilt-inducing," writes Armond White in the New York Press of this "mystifyingly over-praised entry in what's being sold as the Romanian New Wave."

"4 Months isn't even about abortion; it's about the underground black economies which pop up when the command variety cease to function properly," argues the Reeler, adding that the film should end 20 minutes before it does.

Updates, 1/25: "[T]he camera doesn't follow the action, it expresses consciousness itself," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. 4 Months... is "a pitiless, violent story that in its telling becomes a haunting and haunted intellectual and aesthetic achievement." It "deserves to be seen by the largest audience possible, partly because it offers a welcome alternative to the coy, trivializing attitude toward abortion now in vogue in American fiction films, but largely because it marks the emergence of an important new talent in the Romanian writer and director Cristian Mungiu."

The House Next Door's going all out on this one with reviews from Keith Uhlich, Lauren Wissot and Steven Boone.

"It is a stroke of subtle inspiration that it is Otilia and not Gabita who is the focus of the story," writes Daniel Kasman. "Mungiu's evocation of the almost ever-present fear and guilt that invades every physical space of the film becomes all the more poignant and heartrending because it comes not from the most obvious sufferer but from one at the immediate periphery."

Mungiu "knows when to cut someone out of a frame and when to include them, and when he does decide to include something, you can't take your eyes from it," writes Jeffrey M Anderson at Cinematical. "In one scene, Otihttp://www.cinematical.com/2008/01/25/review-4-months-3-weeks-and-2-days-jeffreys-take/lia decides to look through the doctor's bag while he's in the other room, then fumbles to put everything back as he approaches. That's an ancient gambit - almost Hitchcockian - but Mungiu's single-frame, single-take approach adds freshness to it. That's the film's secret. Rather than asking why Gabita needs to go to a back-alley hotel-room doctor for help, it asks, more directly: will Gabita survive?"

"It's a riveting, wrenching, horrifying and beautifully told story," writes Marcy Dermansky.

Online listening tip #1. Mungiu and Anamaria Marinca are guests on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Online listening tip #2. David Edelstein on NPR.

Updates, 1/27: "4 Months unfolds like one of those street-level Dardenne brothers movies (Rosetta, L'Enfant), especially once Marinca has to hustle to secure the hotel or satisfy her self-centered boyfriend's request to attend his mother's birthday party," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "But just as often, Mungiu keeps the camera running for much longer than other directors would, usually in tight, constricting spaces where the audience can feel the characters' anxiety deepening."

"[T]his nonstop anxiety-fest could never be mistaken, as Lazarescu frequently was, for black comedy," writes Mike D'Angelo at Nerve.

Howard Feinstein talks with Mungiu for indieWIRE.

Update, 1/29: Online listening tip. Salon's Andrew O'Hehir talks with Mungiu.

Update, 1/30: Jason Shamai in the San Francisco Bay Guardian on the birthday dinner scene: "Stubbornly stationary, this sequence is as impressive as that famous kinetic take in Children of Men. And the subtleties of the conversation, together with a chillingly apropos conversation with her boyfriend shortly after (he's a massive shit, but is she also covering her bases?), prove the party to be less a dramatic contrast with the preceding events across town than a thickening of the septic social context in which those events occur. It is, as much as abortion, what the film is about."

Posted by dwhudson at January 23, 2008 3:35 PM