This second effort from Romanian film maker Cristian Mungiu was the surprise winner of the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes film festival. Like last year's winner, the Wind that Shakes the Barley, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is a serious film that uses gritty realism to tackle a politically charged hot button issue. The film, set during the last years of the communist regime in Romania, follows a female university student as she helps her friend get an illegal abortion. Shot with a single unflinching hand held camera, the film aspires to raw realism. It opens in the middle of a conversation and ends abruptly mid-gesture to emphasize, as Mungiu described it during the Toronto International Film Festival screening, that the film is less a movie than a small "slice of real life". Judging by the heartfelt responses of some of the Romanians in the audience who got up after the movie to say that it was exactly what they had lived through themselves, it definitely felt like "real life" to them.
To his credit Mungiu resists all temptations to become polemic. The film is not pro-life or pro-choice, and despite showing some of the bleakness and despair of life under the communist regime, it's not really anti-communist either. What the film aspires to most is honesty, and to that end Mungui has tried to strip the film of any indications of artistic intervention. The film has no background music and was shot with naturalistic (and often minimal) light. Even the title is a numerical enumeration, lacking any editorial comment. By taking the artist so completely out of the piece of art in this way, I can't help but feel in some ways that the work has ceased to be art at all. When what a film aspires to most is historical realism, it runs the risk of ceasing to be a film and becoming more like a historical reenactment, something thats value is archival. For me the job of the artist is not, and cannot be, to capture life and events as realistically or accurately as possible, the real job of the artist is to capture them more truthfully than they ever happen in real life. This trend towards documentary realism in which the director completely attempts to withdraw themselves and any editorial comment seems to me to be shirking the duty of the artist completely. While what is captured on the screen is definitely powerful and honest, without any comment, it's really not much more than voyeurism. To his credit Mungiu seems sensitive to the concern, and the one glaring editorial decision he makes, to not show the sex sequence in a film that hasn't otherwise pulled any punches, seems to indicate his concern for the film being perceived as voyeuristic and exploitive.
To his credit Mungiu resists all temptations to become polemic. The film is not pro-life or pro-choice, and despite showing some of the bleakness and despair of life under the communist regime, it's not really anti-communist either. What the film aspires to most is honesty, and to that end Mungui has tried to strip the film of any indications of artistic intervention. The film has no background music and was shot with naturalistic (and often minimal) light. Even the title is a numerical enumeration, lacking any editorial comment. By taking the artist so completely out of the piece of art in this way, I can't help but feel in some ways that the work has ceased to be art at all. When what a film aspires to most is historical realism, it runs the risk of ceasing to be a film and becoming more like a historical reenactment, something thats value is archival. For me the job of the artist is not, and cannot be, to capture life and events as realistically or accurately as possible, the real job of the artist is to capture them more truthfully than they ever happen in real life. This trend towards documentary realism in which the director completely attempts to withdraw themselves and any editorial comment seems to me to be shirking the duty of the artist completely. While what is captured on the screen is definitely powerful and honest, without any comment, it's really not much more than voyeurism. To his credit Mungiu seems sensitive to the concern, and the one glaring editorial decision he makes, to not show the sex sequence in a film that hasn't otherwise pulled any punches, seems to indicate his concern for the film being perceived as voyeuristic and exploitive.