When a film has the kind of critical and festival buzz that was generated in 2007 for “4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days,” you expect to see a film of sheer brilliance—happily this film lives up to its stellar reputation. A product of the important and thriving film community coming out of the former Soviet Union, the film is a bleak and claustrophiabc look at how humans essentially dehumanized each other under the Communist mantra. A tightly writeen and intimately shot piece, “4 Months” succeeds because of the sheer audacity it brings to life in telling the story of two struggling and helpless young women in oppressive 1987 Romania.
From the first shot of the film, the audience knows that this is a world where the illusion of freedom is kept thriving to keep the populace in line – two gold fish keep swimming against the glass of their bowl over and over again with a picture of a city behind them, never able to really move freely. The cramped dorm room of the two girls, the impersonal and bland hotel room where the abortion takes place, the endless parade of hallways that lead nowhere – everything in these girls lives is enclosing and stifling.
I loved the way the director made careful use of ambient noise in this film. There are no musical interludes and sometimes the only sounds are car horns and panting breaths, a symphony of humanity in the worst possible key. In particular, the sound of running water was literally chilling in the film and turned from an inocous noise into an ominous one in a single scene. Masking the sounds of rape in the room opposite as each girl pays for the serves of the abortionist, the sound of running water blocks out the sounds of the assault and then serves to represent the girls’ guilt and disgust. At the end of the film, the only sounds that survive the now pregnant and oppressive silence between the two women caused by their actions is the repetition of passing cars, seeming to signify that the monotonous nature of their lives will push on and not allow them to feel anything.
Going back to intimacy in the film in terms of the camera, I have to say that it was a brilliant turn by the director considering the sheer impersonal nature of the world they live in. The camera here, varying in perspective and often moving from the steady to the blurry, never falls to capture simple gestures and expressions that in turn, capture the mood of the scene. A simple two shot becomes a symbol of oppression hopelessness or the close up of a young woman with eyes closed sitting in a bathroom a moment of intense pain and personal hatred. The film might not win any cinematography awards, but any real films students knows the importance of a tightly edited close up and just how long a shot needs to be held for audience impact – apparently this director was paying attention in film class and for that I appreciate it.
Europe, particularly this area, is still finding its cinematic voice and in turn continues to delve into those periods of its past where the most pain was caused.
Europe, particularly this area, is still finding its cinematic voice and in turn continues to delve into those periods of its past where the most pain was caused.
Unlike American films that often shy away from gritty realism and telling a simple human story, “4 Weeks” is so refreshing in its darkness if that makes any sense to anyone. I mean that film is neither pretentious nor seeming to illustrate some great social truth – it is simply a story the director feels needs to be told about the sacrifice of freedom can lead people to do. This is a particular dark period in Romania’s history in the 1980s, an obviously ugly and drab time of helplessness and fear that had yet to be really explored with such depth and maturity. If examine their part through the cinematic lenses helps give these people a sense of social and historical clarity, we totally need to push them to do this again.
This film deeply touched and affected me and I think there is just one scene that will stay in my mind and I might even revisit. A simple medium shot of a bathroom lit in stark white light…a bloody pile of towels and sheets…the otherwise indistinguishable human face of an aborted baby that no one takes the time to see. It (neither male nor female to the audience) is wrapped in towels, stuffed in a purse and eventually tossed out a garbage shoot by a young girl who has suffered rape and degraded to pay for its death. That tiny, bloody face stays in the farm for nearly a solid minute before you even realize what you are seeing and then it’s gone and I sat up and said “oh my god” – I had no words to for the feelings that scene brought up and I think it will take time to really express what I felt.
Maybe I was sorry to see what women went through in a different time and a different place where they cannot enjoy the freedoms I have.
Maybe I was surprised that a director had the guts to show an aborted fetus on screen without batting a cinematic eye.
Maybe I cannot believe that human life was ever valued so cheaply
Film turns the lenses inside the darkest parts of ourselves and our societies and if films like “4 Weeks” still have the power to shock me, then someone is doing their job. I love that a film can still make me think and feel.
