Abortion: Beyond the Culture Wars to Story–4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, and 2 DAYS

Because this film is not agenda-heavy or preachy, it allows us to see a simple story, based apparently on a true story. We see the dangers of illegal abortion and the ways in which women can easily be taken advantage of in such a situation. We meet a monster, one moment empathetic and knowledgeable and the next moment preying on women in a time of weakness, the abortionist named Bebe. He forces the women to trade sex for Gabita’s abortion, a unimaginable horror at an already emotionally charged moment.

(As an aside, I wish every film dealing with sexual exploitation managed to handle it as appropriately as this one does. The horror of what happens is clear, but is not shown, although some non-sexual nudity is shown. Instead, we see the impact of the exploitation. Nobody gets to get turned on by abuse in this film. It’s not sexy; it’s ugly and traumatizing. The silence and trepidation is more powerful than showing us one more scene of women getting abused. We see the women scrubbing themselves clean of the horror afterwards, rinsing their mouths out. We see their emotional disquiet. In many films and television shows that deal with this evil, there is a risk of exploitative portrayal of the very exploitation that is being condemned. Instead, this film humanizes the victim and shows the horror of the impact.)

And yet, the film in its stark realism also doesn’t squirm away from what abortion actually is–the taking of a life. There is a moment after the abortion has taken place when Otila, who has been charged with disposing of the dead fetus, sees it for the first time. For a long pause, the camera lingers on her and then Gabita staring at the body. Finally, then the camera turns to the fetus and we see it too, looking for all the world like a real developing baby.

This film certainly shows us the unfair pressure put on women in Communist Romania. Even the “good guys” who try to understand the plight of a woman fall short of doing so (as we see in the scenes with Otila’s boyfriend). When he refuses to hear that she needs to attend to something else important the night of his mother’s birthday party and requires her to attend as a precondition to his love, and when she shows up at the party exhausted and drained from having to sell her body in exchange for her friend’s abortion, deeply terrified for the health and safety of her friend post-abortion, and traumatized by it all, he and the family just seem to want her to make merry. The burden the women are asked to bear for society is juxtaposed with the merriment of the gathered guests in a brilliant long single shot, framing Otila and her boyfriend crammed at the end of the table, while family goes on and on about superficial matters, clueless to Otila’s private misery.

But this film also shows us what abortion really is. The seemingly flippant way in which Gabita approaches the abortion is tempered a bit when she actually sees the fetus. Though the abortionist has counseled both women to discard the fetus in a garbage shoot at the top of a building, Gabita, having seen the fetus begs Otila to bury it (a request too dangerous to fulfill). The long focus on the two women’s reaction to seeing the body of the fetus also gives us a sense of the sacredness of the discarded life. Though they might not make another decision given the option, we are not allowed to sequester the result of an abortion as just the removal of some tissue. There is something real here, an actual life.

In the closing scene, the women go down to dinner at the hotel where they are staying and are served the menu of a wedding which is taking place at the hotel: beef, liver, kidneys, breaded brains. The women seem understandably nauseated by this mass of embodied tissue, so reminiscent of the life they just discarded. But the film does not preach this to us. It is subtle and neither pro-choice nor pro-life. It is lived experience. Much like Abortion Diaries.

In the end, 4 Months humanizes all involved in this story. We need more of that. More humanity, more empathy, more listening to stories.

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