Word: otilia
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...gray 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...
...Through the friend of a friend, Gabi has secured the name of someone who'll do the job: a man who calls himself Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov). Gabi is afraid of meeting him, so Otilia is forced to go on the errand, after borrowing some money from her own boyfriend. Mr. Bebe is an imposing fellow: solidly built and radiating macho menace - a solemn thug who thinks he's Brando's Stanley Kowalski. When he shows up at the hotel room the girls have taken, Bebe seems open enough: he lays out the procedure in blunt declarative sentences, Yet every...
...Through the friend of a friend, Gabita has secured the name of someone who'll do the job: the ironically named Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov). She is afraid of meeting him herself, so she sends Otilia on the errand. Mr. Bebe is an imposing fellow: solidly built and radiating macho menace. Every soft-spoken word and compact gesture announces his threat to these women who need his services. It happens that Gabita has bungled his instructions so completely, by not booking a room in the right hotel and not coming herself for the first meeting, that his rancor is almost...
...entries: virtually every scene, no matter how long, is shot without cutting. That can be an enervating strategy, but here it works marvelously, either forcing the characters together as reluctant conspirators or isolating each in his or her predicament. (There's a bustling scene, at the birthday party of Otilia's boyfriend's mother, that becomes a kind of tour de force, with the gaiety of the celebrants making the girl's misery all the more palpable.) It may be minimalism, but in the best sense: Mungiu has stripped away anything not essential to the story...
...Mungiu also plays games with the audience. As the story unspools he plants three tantalizing details that point it toward a melodramatic climax. Otilia filches a switchblade from the abortionist's case; she learns where Bebe's mother lives; and she comes into possession of his I.D. card, which presumably reveals his address. Will Otilia track Bebe down for the punishment he may deserve? Will all three principals survive their assignation? We're not telling. Suffice to say that what's done with these plot elements is as surprising as the rest of this gripping, satisfying film...