4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days directed by Cristian Mungiu, and: If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle directed by Florin Serban, and: The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu directed by Andrei Ujica (review)

Countries around the world seem to produce films in swells and sags; at any time, one or another of those countries seems especially prolific. Often there is no social or economic reason for this surge: it depends on the capricious occurrence of talent along with good luck in distribution. For the last ten years or so, one of the leaders has been Romania. I ascribe no specifically Romanian reason to this efflorescence: talent has simply blossomed, there as elsewhere, and been lucky. This review looks at two products of the New Romanian Cinema, as well as on one instance of its antithesis.

4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (2007) lures the viewer into the peculiar temporal rhythm of a number of recent Romanian films. I never expected to see a film in which, at the end, the two leading characters sit facing each other, silent, both of them simply steeped in what has happened to them. Then, but not hurriedly, only after we have understood their silence, the picture ends.

Cristian Mungiu's screenplay, which he also directed, concerns two young women who are university students in 1987 and share a room in a dormitory. At the start Otilia and Gabita are preparing for a trip, and after a while we learn where they are going and why. The title, it turns out, is the length of time that Gabita has been pregnant, and Otilia is helping her to arrange an abortion. The practitioner, not a doctor, meets them cautiously in a hotel room and, as part of his fee, requires something they had not anticipated: sex with Otilia.

Otilia, who complies for Gabita's sake, carries most of the film. Besides this compliance, besides all the fussing and arguing and persuasions, her role includes a quick visit to a birthday party for her boyfriend's mother, where she sits at a table in the midst of banal chat while she is riven with worry about Gabita back in that hotel room. At the end of the twenty-four-hour span of the story, Otilia has been through a sort of socio-emotional marathon, but it never seems crowded or factitious because of the way in which time is taken, is inhabited, all along the way. The very presence of time as environment has a strange effect: it lifts the picture out of the naturalistic into something like expressionism.

We are told that this film has a political intent for Romania. It takes place during the Ceauescu regime, when there were severe laws against abortion (and an estimated 500,000 women died from illegal abortions). Mungio presents most of the details in the ghastly procedure, which, we are to understand, has since been replaced with sanity. But, quite apart from its political weight for Romanians, the picture has its own life in art, not least because women's lack of reproductive freedom becomes a metaphor in the film for Romanians' lack of freedom in general—political, economic, or otherwise.

The cinematographer, Oleg Mutu, used a color scheme that is neither garish nor bleak: everything looks like itself, almost pitilessly. The acting follows suit. Vlad Ivanov makes the abortionist the product of circumstances. Laura Vasiliu, as Gabita, mixes pathos with patience. Anamaria Marinca, in the more demanding role of Otilia, meets those demands with an acceptance of things as they are. And one of those things is Romanian time, imperious even in a dingy hotel room.

If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle (2010) was directed by Florin Serban, from a screenplay he crafted with...