Word: marinca
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...pall on the country, putting most of the citizenry in a perpetually sour mood. Survival is a glum game of avoiding or appeasing the apparatchiks. The black market, for shampoo and Kent cigarettes, is on each street corner, in every college dormitory. That's where we meet Otilia (Annamaria Marinca), a smart, illusionless student, and her pretty, mopey roommate Gabita (Laura Vasiliu). Gabi is despondent for a reason: she's pregnant and is about to try to get, with Otilia's help, an abortion - illegal at the time in Romania...
...That story is tautly, bravely acted, especially by Marinca, an ordinary-looking woman who rivets the camera's attention, and Ivanov, whose bulky poise makes him a figure to fear. More important, the tale is so compelling that it seduces viewers as a fairy tale does a child. They simply must know, as the plot knot coils tighter around the characters, What Happens Next. It's not spoiling anything to say that the resolution is right and realistic - and far from the ending Hollywood would devise, if it ever dared to make a movie like 4 Months...
...during the final days of the Ceausescu regime, when the whole country seems to be in a sour mood. But politics are in the background of this taut, fraught drama about what goes wrong when a college student (Laura Vasiliu) seeks an illegal abortion. She and her roommate (Anamaria Marinca) are led to the ironically named Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov), a stolid fellow with a sulfurous whiff of menace. He'll do the job, but for a price that horrifies the desperate women. Shot and acted with ferocious precision, 4 Months is a movie well worth seeking out and shuddering...
...regime. The burdens of Soviet-style dictatorship have imposed a gray pall on the country, putting most of the citizenry in a perpetually sour mood. The black market, for shampoo and Kent cigarettes, is on each street corner, in every college dormitory. That's where we meet Otilia (Annamaria Marinca), a smart, illusionless student, and her pretty, mopey roommate Gabita (Laura Vasiliu). Gabita is despondent for a reason: she's pregnant and is about to try to get, with Otilia's help, an abortion - illegal at the time in Romania...
...That story is tautly, bravely acted, especially by Marinca, an ordinary-looking woman who rivets the camera's attention, and Ivanov, whose bulky poise makes him a figure to fear. More important, the tale is so compelling that it seduces viewers as a fairy tale does a child. They simply must know, as the plot knot coils tighter around the characters, What Happens Next...
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