Word: womanities
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...American romantic comedies like Knocked Up, Waitress and Juno, a woman's unwanted pregnancy is the springboard for sexual love, self-knowledge and, as she comes to term, the rosy maturity that Hollywood sees as motherhood. The word "abortion" is hardly spoken of; the procedure gets no serious consideration. Abortion is simply not an option for the heroines of these pictures, though it is for more than a million American women a year...
...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...
...meeting place, the money, certainly the extent of her pregnancy. She says it's two months, then three; you'll have to guess the actual time. Perhaps Gabi is afraid that no one will help her if she tells the truth; perhaps lying has got this pretty young woman this far, and, now, in this condition. But, in a way, both Bebe (who is risking 10 years in prison) and Otilia (who must suffer collateral damage from Bebe's demands) are the victims of the falsehoods Gabi hasn't bothered to think through. Stupidity, the film says...
...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...
...than an abortion was to the cheerful women with their initially unwanted fetuses in the American movies. It's as if life in Romania is so soul-destroying that Gabi doesn't want to bring another soul into it. Which may be the one thoughtful decision this immature young woman ever made...