4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days

There is a wonderful bit of dialogue in the Hemingway short story Hills Like White Elephants that evokes much of what Christian Mungiu’s new film is all about.  The story is set in a sparse and sticky railway station and sees two characters discuss the merits of having an abortion:

‘They just let the air in and then it’s all perfectly natural.’
‘Then what will we do afterwards?’
‘We’ll be fine afterwards. Just like we were before.’

With typically underplayed poignancy, the dialogue chisels away at its scene, revealing only the tip of an emotional iceberg. The man’s perversely elemental line of persuasion is pure bluff and baloney; the women’s searching response a practical and harrowing look beyond the short-term. Tellingly, the idea of the status quo pervades these exchanges. For Hemingway’s hedonistic and post WW1 couple, the experience of free living has been blunted by the responsibility of impending parenthood. A white elephant in the womb, their foetus has left them desperately seeking the innocence of before.

There is a similar rumination on the importance of status quo at the heart of 4 3 2, although it follows inverted, reflected, transmogrified logic.

Set in 1980’s Romania, the film watches Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) as she tries to help her roommate Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) secure and receive a termination. Not, it becomes evident, an easy task in the land of Ceausescu’s struggling autarchic police state, where abortion is one of many on the list of official evils. What follows proves to be a series of excruciatingly negotiated transactions that fiercely berate the flimsy status quo of Ceausescu’s regime.

As Otilia arranges the hotel room and meets the abortionist – a Mr. Bebe, played to stunning effect by Vlad Ivanov – she encounters a world of resistance. Nothing is easy, from riding the tram to booking a hotel room, and it is only Otilia’s sense of doggedness and worldly understanding that sees her through. From the opening scene she is thrust into the thick of an illegal commodity market, and we see her negotiate her way to a packet of Kent cigarettes having dealt with underground newsagents and shady looking men. These cigarettes bribe better than money, and prove that if there is a status quo here it is one propped up only by the circumspect activity of the black-market.

By showing such underhand dealings to be part of the way of life, Mungiu paints the crushingly nullifying position Gabita is faced with. Her abortion is at one and the same time an act against the status quo, and an attempt to keep the status quo, both of her own life and the grey area economy she lives within. It’s a kind of Catch 22, a clever dialectic that makes for fascinating viewing and explains why every movement in the film meets some form of oppressive difficulty.

Much of 4 3 2’s success rests in its ability to accentuate this atmosphere of resistance without overplaying things. The dialogue is comparable to Hemingway’s, and is lensed through quiet yet unhinging movements. Mungiu’s camera sways and shakes through scene-long takes, yet it rarely interferes or comments. Instead, action takes place offscreen, seemingly extending itself outside the frame and into the auditorium itself. The effect is striking; 4 3 2 puts its viewers on edge, and then somehow manages to keep them there.

Pushed into a state of agitation, 4 3 2 does to its viewer exactly what it does to Otilia. Like her, we are left increasingly breathless by the structural work she must do to get simple tasks completed, and the oppressive force of the regime becomes palpable even though not one policeman is seen throughout the film. Rather, the law is everywhere; it’s in the middle class dining room attitudes of Otilia’s boyfriend’s family, and it’s in the entrenched bitterness of the hotel receptionists. The encompassing effect Mungiu creates reminds of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, where regulation ultimately comes from everywhere and from within.

However, Gabita and Otilia both work against the law, and much of the supreme tension of the film stems from their opposition to an external force. If this force seems largely unidentified throughout 4 3 2, then the final seconds of the film make it all too clear where the power lies. It’s a virtuoso ending to a virtuoso film, and it reminds you exactly why you’ve been sitting on the edge of your seat throughout.

As with Hemingway, the status quo is of interest to Mungiu. And as with Hemingway, dialogue is the important vehicle. Hills Like White Elephants and 4 3 2 make for happy bed partners (if you’ll excuse the untimely illusion). But there is one important difference. If Hills Like White Elephants is the tip of Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory, then 4 3 2 is the bow of the Titanic being split asunder.