Word: mungiu
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...instructive dramatizing of the problem - and more important, for one of the strongest movies in recent years - they should see writer-director Christian Mungiu's Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. It was the top prize-winner at Cannes last May, though, preposterously, it was not Oscar-nominated for best foreign-language film. No matter. Go see it. The movie is currently playing in just a few cities, but it's available on the pay-per-view service In Demand, on many Time Warner cable systems. You don't even have to leave home to catch...
...Mungiu sets his story in 1987, toward the exhausted end of the Ceausescu regime. Many freedoms were terminated during this despotic time, among them a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy. As J. Hoberman noted in The Village Voice: "Abortion was made illegal in Romania in 1966; by the time Ceausescu was overthrown 23 years later, an estimated half-million women had died as a result of botched illegal abortions. The nation's overflowing orphanages were notorious for their subhuman conditions...
...force - a 7-1/2min. take, with the careless gaiety of the celebrants making the girl's misery all the more palpable. The next shot, off the same duration, lays out the tensions between Otilia and her beau. The style may be minimalist, but in the best sense: Mungiu has stripped away anything not essential to the story...
...MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS In the dank days of the Ceausescu regime, a college girl seeks an illegal abortion, and finds just the wrong guy to perform it. Beautifully acted, and as creepy as any horror movie, Christian Mungiu's drama earned the top prize at this year's Cannes...
...success of Christian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days at Cannes, where it won the Palme d'Or, has many critics hyping the new Romanian cinema. The Mungiu drama will play prominently at Toronto, but Cowan's enthusiasm for a national Romanian film movement is guarded. He notes that TIFF's resident specialist on Eastern European films, programmer Dimitri Eipides, "approaches the Romanian new wave with some skepticism. You could barely field a soccer team with all the Romanian filmmakers. Apparently there's one great teacher at the film school there who has passed his influence...