So many good memories are coming back these past few weeks while revisiting my film & media past. Rummaging through my ASU assignments circa 2010 – I’d completely forgotten about a few of these films that I’d previously watched for class assignments which still resonate today. With all the furor over abortion and reproductive rights (whether in the United States or elsewhere) Four Months, Three Weeks And Two Days is totally worth another look. This is what I wrote twelve years ago for a class term paper: Romania is not a bastion of compelling cinematic offerings to most American minds, so it’s not surprising that it’s cinematic offerings (such as they are) receive scant attention here at best.
A university film course is one of the few opportunities to view such an obscure and dreary communist era story like Four Months, Three Weeks And Two Days. Though set during the final decade of communist control over Eastern Europe in the 1980s, the similarities to The Lives Of Others are not striking. The biggest trial of totalitarian existence in Lives…is just that, Big Brother smothering and overshadowing every aspect of life to the point of intense, inescapable wiretap surveillance hidden in everyplace conceivable – and unimaginable. With our latest tale of socialist paradise (not!) Four Months stresses the constant consumer shortages which kill the will to live. The heavy police state doesn’t manifest itself here so much. Of course, with Lives most of the main protagonists belonged to the artistic elite, while in Four Months our cast is regular, everyday people who lack any influential communist party connections.
So, it seems to boil down to different stations in life under oppressive regimes resulting in different sets of problems, and maybe even separate risks. However, the same drab aesthetics and fairly listless characterizations permeate both films. The only lively, cheerful sequence is from Four Months, when one of our main characters (Ottilia) attends the birthday party thrown for boyfriend’s mother. Even here the conversation is overshadowed by the actions of an unpopular regime – which decides what you will study in college, what type of job you will have once you graduate from the university, and even where you will end up living.
In one way, though, our main characters in Four Months, Ottilia and Gabita take the biggest risk of the two stories as they are dealing with the black market and colluding in Gabita’s illegal abortion with a backstreet doctor. With The Lives Of Others speaking out against the government either directly or subversively would be bad enough to get you a long prison term in East Germany. On the other hand, college students involved in abortion, the black market, and travel/hotel deception in Nicolas Ceacescu’s Romania (believed to be the harshest regime in Europe prior to 1989) could be considerably worse punishment-wise.
Although Four Months played out mostly as a static drama, near the end as Ottilia smuggles the aborted fetus out of the hotel in her purse, it began to take on the dimensions of a horror show. The suspense is genuine as she wanders through darkened alleys and the grim staircase of a derelict building trying to dispose of the fetus while struggling to hold back panic. At one moment the police are close by (and Ottilia doesn’t have her ID on her!), a man (who seems like a potential rapist) follows her at one point to a bus stop, and then the sudden loud barking of a dog behind a trash dumpster is enough to give the viewer a heart attack! The fear this sequence evokes is fairly typical of a Hollywood-style horror movie – as the lone female is being stalked by the killer.
The camera work was quite convincing in creating that sense of fear and dread. The only drastic disappointment with the film is near the end – just as it was becoming most absorbing. When Ottilia meets with Gabita in the hotel restaurant (after successfully disposing of the fetus) I was really curious to see what their next moves would be – despite vowing to never speak of it again. Then the story is abruptly over. Though the film ran for close to two hours as it was, would have looked forward to another twenty minutes or so as the ending the director chose was like an amputation without any anesthetic preparation.
Thinking about all of this now, I cannot help but think how our own country has taken a giant leap backward when it comes to reproductive choices in the aftermath of Roe Vs. Wade. For many women who are poor and powerless they may well have to resort to the same actions to end a pregnancy – much like the two women in the all too realistic Four Months, Three Weeks And Two Days.
