by Owen
Hsieh, August 18, 2026
Amid its curated collection of Romanian New Wave
films the Criterion Channels recently added a socially significant film: 4
Months, 3 weeks and 2 days by Christian Mungiu. Available via
Criterion Channel’s Romanian New Wave Retrospective this film deserves comment
as it highlighted a topic of social concern under those who lived through Romanian
Stalinism: “Illegal abortion and its tragic consequences on numberless female
destinies”.[1]
This intense film is set in Romania 1987, shortly before the overthrow and
execution of Ceausescu in 1989; It features two female dorm students who seek
an illegal abortion and are thus imperilled.
Going against the current of merely satirising and
poking fun at the idiocies of Ceausescu, (a trend which in he once took part
with the making of his first feature film: Occident (2002)), it is to his
credit that Mungiu instead opted to make a serious feature drama and analyse the
brutal realities of Romanian Stalinism. It was noted that a turning point for
Mungiu here was a young reader examining an early script for Tales from a
Golden Age (2009), and blithely remarking “Life under communism seems to
have been a lot of fun”.[2]
Mungiu thereafter sought to educating a younger generation of what Romanian
Stalinism was actually like.
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| Christian Mungiu |
This is however not on the usual level of a crude
anti-communist film, but is quite a sophisticated work. Mungiu collected various
oral histories of the period and was able to “…chronicle in an extremely
accurate way the terror of everyday life during the last days of one of the
most oppressive dictatorships in Eastern Europe”.[3]
4 Months, 3 weeks and 2 days won the Cannes Palme D’Or at its debut
screening, along with a slew of other prizes that year. According to one
critic: ‘it remains the most acclaimed Romanian production of the last decades’.[4]
The two protagonists Otilia and Gabita are
university students sharing a single room dorm. Gabita is pregnant. Early in
the film they travel to a neighbouring town and book a hotel room, arranging to
meet an abortionist. In response to Ceausescu’s reactionary pro-natal laws, the
arrangements are quite discrete and carefully coordinated. There are some minor
changes of plans which incense the man that they have to meet. Upon his arrival
at the hotel, he deploys extreme psychological pressure to blackmail the two
girls into sex. This meets the criteria of rape as the vulnerable women are coerced
and forced to accept the sexual arrangement so that the procedure will proceed.
While the physical act is not shown, we see the
outcome in one long take with the bathing women’s crying, pain-stricken faces. Shortly
thereafter, Otilia composes herself and heads out to make an appearance at her
mother in laws birthday party. Her in laws are members of the well-to-do
nomenklatura and are revealed to be either ignorant or uncaring regarding the difficulties
and hardships of life for most Romanians. Shortly after arriving they ask about
Otilia’s parents, where she responds,
My father is in the military and
my mother is retired on disability. They worked together when they were younger.
One responds patronisingly,
Simple folk often have better
sense than the educated.
Later, after toasting and feasting on an
exquisite dinner, one dinner party participant rails against the alleged
privileges of youth,
Look at today’s youngsters, it’s
all handed to them on a plate, dorms, state aid, Mum and Dad spoon feeding them.
and,
Kids today must learn that life
is hard, that no one will coddle them. They’d send me out to graze the cow and I’d
do my homework by lamplight.
This long dinner party scene features authentic
dialogue and throws inequality into sharp refrain. In subtle ways, it sharply
juxtaposes an unequal society. There is an easy comparison to the dingy student
accommodation, the brutal, demoralising experience she just had to the
tastefully decorated apartment and lavish birthday dinner party. The dinner
party scene ran to nearly 8 minutes across one take and has been described by
one critic as an “undisputable tour de force”.[5]
It took 20 attempts and 500 meters of filming material to capture.
Otilia heads back to the hotel where she finds
that the abortion has been successful and begins to clean up. In the infamous
third bathroom scene we are forced to endure an unbearable image as Mungiu
forces upon the audience a jarring still image of the aborted foetus in a scene
which runs for 14 seconds. Compared to the infantile Gabita, Otilia is much
more mature and capable of dealing with the aftermath of the abortion and
disposing of all the evidence to hide this terrible secret.
The film ends simply at an austere dimly lit
restaurant table, with the anticlimactic statement: “Lets never speak about it
anymore”. Otilia pensively looks out the restaurant window directly into the
camera. It is not clear if she is looking at the viewer, or some third party
who has followed her nighttime wandering and is aware of her illegal act.
The film is an intense experience excoriating the
policy of banned abortions in Ceausescu’s Romania in its own variant of
Stalinism that was “peculiarly vicious and repressive”. [6]
It highlights the debilitating experience of women in Romania under decree 770
of 1966 which criminalised contraception and banned abortion for all women
under 40 with less than four children. The program was ramped up in 1973 to
arrest declining birthrates as abortion was seriously punished with many
doctors and abortionists labelled serial killers arrested, tortured or imprisoned.[7]
The policy is less known, yet comparable to the Maoist infamous one child
policy. It was so widely despised, that In 1990 one year after Ceausescu was
deposed, ‘the reviled abortion decree was immediately rescinded’.[8]
The puzzling roots of Ceausescu’s natal policies
that impacted so many women can only be understood by examining Trotsky’s
writings from the late 1930s. The ban on abortion in Romania would not be
possible without the ban on abortions first in the Stalinist USSR. In analysing
the attack on the right to abortion in the USSR in the late 1930s, Trotsky
wrote, in the Revolution Betrayed, on the immediate period after the
Bolshevik seizure of power:
The revolutionary power gave
women the right to abortion, which in conditions of want and family distress,
is one of her most important civil, political and cultural rights.
However:
The state makes a sharp change
of course, and takes the road of prohibition with abortion punishable with
imprisonment. This foul police interference in what is to every woman the most
intimate sphere of life is indistinguishable from relations in Capitalist
countries.
The oppression of women was concomitant with the
Stalinist counterrevolution from above which wound back and undid many
progressive policies implemented by Lenin’s Bolsheviks. The ban on abortion
proceeded à la the repudiation of the right of countries to
self-determination, a distasteful chapter of history masterfully examined in
Moshe Lewin’s Lenin’s Last Struggle.
Ceausescu’s pro natal policies were the logical
outgrowth of socialism in one country, turning women into broodmares to raise
the birth rate was an enfeebled attempt to lift economic indicators using
realpolitik, rather than the program of world social revolution. This was the
policy of Stalinism in the Postwar period with the dissolution of the Comintern
and the signing of the Potsdam Agreement.
Knowingly or not, Christian Mungui insightfully
brings this history and these issues to the fore. 4 Months, 3 weeks and 2
days is well worth seeing while its available. The minimalist film throws
this entire tawdry experience into sharp refrain.
NOTES
[1] Nasta,
Dominique. 2013. Contemporary Romanian Cinema : The History of an
Unexpected Miracle. London: Wallflower Press. 181
[2] Nasta,
Dominique. 2013. Contemporary Romanian Cinema : The History of an Unexpected
Miracle. London: Wallflower Press. 187
[3] Nasta,
Dominique. 2013. Contemporary Romanian Cinema : The History of an
Unexpected Miracle. London: Wallflower Press. 187
[4] Pop,
Doru. 2021. Romanian Cinema : Thinking Outside the Screen. New
York: Bloomsbury Academic. 87
5 Nasta,
Dominique. 2013. Contemporary Romanian Cinema : The History of an
Unexpected Miracle. London: Wallflower Press. 194
[6] Judt,
Tony. 2005. Postwar : A History of Europe since 1945. New York:
Penguin Press. 431
[7] Nasta,
Dominique. 2013. Contemporary Romanian Cinema : The History of an Unexpected
Miracle. London: Wallflower Press. 187
[8] Stan,
Lavinia, and Diane Vancea, eds. 2024. Post-Communist Progress and
Stagnation at 35 : The Case of Romania. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 12
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