When 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days — Cristian Mungiu’s masterful film about a woman and her friend trying to procure an illegal abortion in 1980s Romania — won the Palme D’Or at Cannes earlier this year, a number of people wrote as though the film took some sort of implicitly pro-choice stance (“if only abortion had been legal in Romania at that time, these women would not have had to go to such lengths, or allow themselves to be exploited so badly,” that sort of thing). Catholic blogger Victor Morton, who saw the film at the Toronto film festival, didn’t see it in quite that light, but his positive appraisal was still worded somewhat cautiously:
As for the portrayal of abortion. Yes, this movie is in a very broad sense *about* the quest for an illegal abortion. Abortion as either a moral matter or a political issue simply does not appear, on either side. The decision to abort was made before the movie begins, and the abortion and disposing of the dead baby are simply tasks in a laundry list and, unlike in VERA DRAKE, nobody says abortion is wrong. But there is a shot of the result of the abortion that doesn’t last long but is as in-you-face and bloody as any pro-life group poster (this being the 5th month, it’s an undeniably human form and it’s far more explicit than the original ALFIE. Squeamish: Consider this your warning.) On balance, I would put it this way: 4 MONTHS is a movie where nobody says word of pro-choice propaganda and which shows an aborted corpse dead on the floor. That’s a net plus.
But now comes Jeffrey Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere — not the most right-wing of bloggers — who calls the film an “absolute” “masterpiece” and “the most persuasive anti-abortion argument in any form I’ve ever heard, seen or read.” Wow! He then adds:
I did what I could to assist two former girlfriends in getting two abortions — one in the mid ’70s, the other ten years later — so I know a little bit about what it feels like peripherally (and a little bit psychologically), but I’ve never felt so immersed in the hard particulars of grappling with the reality of getting an abortion until catching this film last Friday night. I didn’t just feel moved and shaken — I felt changed after it was over.
I saw this film at the Vancouver film festival, and will be reviewing it soon — it doesn’t open in the States until January, but it opens in Canada November 2 — so I knew the film was good. But I hadn’t expected to see it get reactions like this! This makes me all the more eager to see the film again, to encourage other people to see it, and to see what sort of dialogue emerges around this film.
UPDATE: Jeffrey Wells has now posted a follow-up, asserting that most pro-lifers will “avoid this film in droves” because they don’t like subtitles and “are largely xenophobic when it comes to sampling foreign cultures and their films.” Let’s hope he’s wrong — and let’s hope that, if he is wrong, pro-lifers won’t try to turn the film into a propaganda tool, but will engage with it as art.
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