The Frame

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is one of the most impressive films of the year regardless of national origin, and it’s better than 75% of the films that have ever won the Best Foreign Film Oscar. It’s 1987 in Bucharest, Romania, and a woman is placing herself in all sorts of legal and physical danger to help her friend obtain an illegal abortion. Though the story sounds as if it would be politically pro-choice, and I suppose if you forced a political viewpoint on it, that’s what you’d come away with (though it makes little sense considering that abortion is now legal in Romania, and the country has one of the highest abortion rates in the world–there’s no political reason for the film to make a pro-abortion statement), but it’s really neither pro-choice nor pro-life; rather, it’s profoundly ambiguous and refuses to allow the audience to easily choose either side. The style is extremely minimalist (this film and 2006’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu are at the forefront of Romania’s current New Wave, which so far tends toward minimalist realism), and that’s what really made the film so powerful. The camera moves so little that when it does, it has an almost physical force. At root 4 Months is a thriller, but a thriller that thrills through the lack of movement rather than an excess of it, as most American thrillers do. In the final shot, the woman turns and stares straight at the camera for a moment, as if daring us to make sense of the events we have just witnessed, daring us to go back to our lives smug and unchanged.
Superior