The Wall Street Journal-20080125-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Entertainment - Culture -- Review - Film- -4 Months- Tells Dark Tale With Gripping Style- Romanian drama has great acting and images- a joyless -Untraceable-
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WEEKEND JOURNAL; Entertainment & Culture -- Review / Film: '4 Months' Tells Dark Tale With Gripping Style; Romanian drama has great acting and images; a joyless 'Untraceable'
'4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" has been winning prizes and garnering accolades ever since last year's Cannes Film Festival, where it was awarded the highest prize, the Palme d'Or. (Last week an Oscar committee disgraced itself, and once again discredited the foreign- film selection process, by eliminating this Romanian entry from the short list for an Academy Award.) I'm not in the habit of invoking the subject of honors in the course of a review; normally that's a publicist's job. But Cristian Mungiu's elegantly crafted, brilliantly acted film, set in Bucharest in the late 1980s, near the end of the vile Ceausescu regime, needs special help in finding the audience it deserves. That means an audience willing to go in with eyes -- and spirit -- wide open, and to exchange the usual pleasures of entertainment for a dark, unforgettable study of implacable evil, personal responsibility and unintended consequences.
The subject reveals itself gradually. Two young women in a college dorm, Gabita and Otilia, are preparing for a trip. Soap must be bought, goldfish must be fed. "It's like you're going camping," Otilia says dryly. But the destination isn't a campground. It's an expensive hotel where Otilia, the organized one, has made arrangements for her frightened, scattered roommate to have an abortion. (The title refers to the advanced stage of Gabita's pregnancy.)
In the Communist Romania of the period, abortion under any circumstances is a crime that carries prison terms for those who perform it, submit to it or facilitate it. The underground abortionist here, Mr. Bebe, is played by an extraordinary actor named Vlad Ivanov. First he's portrayed as a convincing approximation of a human being -- laconic, calmly methodical, possibly competent, a stickler for responsibility, mutual trust and above all caution: After the fourth month, Mr. Bebe notes, the crime isn't abortion, it's murder. When the arrangements he has insisted on go awry, however, the abortionist turns into a silent predator who destroys not just one life but, in a chilling and unpredictable sense, two.
Silence has a significant role in the film, much of which plays out at an audaciously -- and hypnotically -- slow pace: The filmmaker and his cinematographer, Oleg Mutu, have staged several remarkable sequences with a quiet austerity reminiscent of the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. It's not like watching grass grow -- grass doesn't flourish in the bleak junkyard that the nation's capital has become under Communist rule. Rather, there's a sense of being able to watch thoughts form while the two young women consider their fate in the confines of their hotel room. And it's a shared fate, for Otilia, having agreed to help Gabita, pays dearly for her roommate's irresponsibility.
Otilia is played by Anamaria Marinca, an actress whose phenomenal performance comes to dominate the film, which, in its turn, opens up into more than a drama about abortion. (Though it's very much a drama about abortion, depicting both the dire results of an outright government ban, and the stunning reality of an aborted fetus.) Like "The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu," a 2005 film -- also shot by Mr. Mutu -- that portrayed Romania's health care system as mostly dehumanized and dysfunctional, "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" evokes a nation suffering from economic and emotional stagnation. Black markets are the only flourishing markets. Service workers dispense disdain in lieu of service.
Against this desolate landscape, Otilia's plight is all the more anguishing. Her worst crimes have been friendship and loyalty, yet she finds herself running through nighttime Bucharest like a fugitive from justice, afflicted by grief that may not be curable. In one of those Ozu-like sequences, a stationary camera studies her as she sits in silence at a birthday dinner while others at the table talk cheerful small talk of Easter egg dyes and favorite recipes. In a pensive moment toward the end, Otilia and Gabita reconnect at a table in the dining room of the hotel, where guests at a wedding party dance on the other side of a windowed wall. Watching the two women watching each other doesn't qualify for a moment as entertainment, but the movie is a window into their souls.
'Untraceable'
'Untraceable" doesn't qualify as entertainment either, though it's supposed to. This joyless thriller runs the gamut from unconscionable through unwatchable to unendurable. It's also unfathomable that two talented people, Diane Lane and her director, Gregory Hoblit, got themselves involved in such an unpromising enterprise.
The subject is cyber crime -- the ostensible subject, since the world of virtual vice is only an excuse for making a sleazy simulation of a snuff film. Ms. Lane is Jennifer Marsh, an FBI agent assigned to chasing down criminals who operate on the Internet. Her quarry -- and, eventually, her tormentor -- is a serial killer with a supposedly untraceable Web site and a gift for exploiting new media. After kidnapping his victims-to-be, he puts them on global display in streaming video, tortures them in various grisly ways and then links the intensity of the torture to the number of hits -- the more millions of people who log on, the sooner the victim dies. "Any American who visits the site is an accomplice to murder," says a grim- faced FBI techie. "We are the murder weapon." (What about Andorrans or Zambians who visit the site? Aren't they culpable too?)
There's a moral, of course -- a voyeuristic public gets the entertainment it deserves. But what have we done to deserve this? The only original idea is the bad guy's ability to hack into a car computer. Maybe that will prompt the automobile industry to protect its products with passwords.
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Morgenstern's DVD TIP
The link between "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" and "Alfie" (1966) may seem far-fetched, but it's real. The first and only time Michael Caine's likable misogynist of the title displays anything resembling a conscience is after a lady friend undergoes a squalid abortion. The camera doesn't show the dead fetus, as it does in the Romanian film, but Alfie describes it, to devastating effect.
