4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS (4 LUNI, 3 SAPTAMINI SI 2 ZILE) World Cinema

Winner of Cannes’ Palme d’Or, writer/director Cristian Mungiu’s masterwork manages to be political without a single conventional reference to politics.

The story, set in the final year of Ceaucescu’s dictatorship in Romania, depicts a college student (the magnificent Anamaria Marinca) in her attempts to help her roommate (Laura Vasiliu) obtain an illegal abortion. As the film progresses, we under stand how the falseness of the political system has infected every moral and spiritual impulse to resist it. Almost everything that can go wrong does and 4 MONTHS becomes an object lesson in how repression infects a culture. More than just imprisonment and torture, life under the regime becomes a prosaic nightmare, built upon each citizen’s complicity in ineptitude, lies and betrayal.

Filming almost exclusively in long takes that are sometimes unbearably suspenseful, Mungiu places great faith in his outstanding cast, builds compositions that are impossible to shake from our brains and hearts and captures us in the same deadly traps that have snared his characters . By the end, we’re shattered.