Wednesday Minute
No. 19 | January 27, 2010

Best of the Decade

Our theme this week
Best movies of the decade at Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes

Featured this week
Monday         —   The Hurt Locker
Tuesday         —   Ratatouille

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

The essentials
Metacritic:  97
Rotten Tomatoes:  96%

It’s 1987, a small town in Romania.  Ceauşescu is dictator, abortion is illegal, and Găbiţă is desperate.  She is pregnant, in her third month, she says.  It’s a lie.  It won’t be her last.

Găbiţă has the help of her dorm roommate, Otilia, who sells belongings, down to cigarettes and soap, to help pay for the abortion.  Nothing goes right.  The hotel has no record of her reservation.  Another hotel is expensive.  Mr. Bebe, the abortionist, wants more than just money.  Otilia is late for a birthday party.  She tells her boyfriend about the abortion, the least of what’s happened.  There’s only so much truth she can share.  She returns to Găbiţă, and even with her, she can never speak of what happened again.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is a story of desperation, secrets, and shame.  It’s simply told, and devastating.  The film is part of a larger project called “Tales from the Golden Age,” stories about life in Romania under the communist regime.  The film is not overtly political.  The focus is instead on people who have suffered hardships, have limited options to pursue, and must pay a price.

Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu wrote and directed 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.  The movie won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2007, the first Romanian film to win that honor.  Mungiu had been to Cannes before, with his film Occident, in 2002.  He has said that Miloš Forman and Robert Altman are among the directors who influenced him. 

Beyond the final credits
It has been two decades since the fall of communism in Romania, and the past few years has seen an emergence of filmmaking in the country that ranks with the world’s best.  The lastest countryman of Mungiu’s to win international acclaim is Corneliu Porumboiu, for last year’s Police, Adjective.  Romania may seem like an unlikely place for great cinema.  Here’s Mungiu, about the reception to his film and how things are changing:

Unless we got this kind of recognition it wouldn’t have been possible for us Romanians to make these films…In 1989, we had 400 cinemas; now we have 35.  So I said:  Okay, whatever I do, I can’t reach many people doing this.  So, last summer I organized a caravan that tours Romania with my film, screening it in places that no longer have a cinema.  We had an excellent result.

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4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007)
Trailer

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Quote of Note
“My name is Tatiana.  My father died in the mines in my village, so he was already buried when he died.  We were all buried there.  Buried under the soil of Russia.  That is why I left, to find a better life.”
— Tatania (voice of Tatiana Maslany), Eastern Promises (2007)

…58…59…60.