[Film Review] '4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days'

After the success of Canadian film 'Juno' last year, this exceptional and confronting Romanian film hit international cinemas at a pitch-perfect time. Both films deal with the issue of teenage pregnancy, though whilst 'Juno' is set in an advantaged, middle-class family environment, '4 Months, 3 Weeks And 3 Days' finds it's protagonists in communist Romania, with not nearly as many choices.

The contrasts further reveal themselves as Juno, with her family in tow, patiently shops around for the perfect couple to adopt her baby... a world away from Gabita, the pregnant lead of '4 Months', and her friend Otilia, whom, alone, are desperately trying to arrange an illegal, and very dangerous, abortion.

I think we know where I'm going with this: 'Juno' is a cute comedy; '4 Months' is a raw tragedy.

The catch-phrase slogan of '4 Months' reads, 'How far would you go for a friend?', but I feel the subtext in this movie reflect a wider struggle, a struggle that asks the question; 'How far must a woman go because of a man?' How marginalised is the destiny of a woman under a patriarchal legal system?

Before seeing this film, I had felt that the most powerful movie I had seen in recent years was undoubtedly 'Hunger' (2008), which covers the IRA hunger strikes in Belfast's Maze Prison during the early 80's. After viewing '4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days' though, it is clear to me that for all it's gritty courage and bloody persecution, what gave 'Hunger' a weighted sense of poignancy was, in fact, just that: pathetic and pointless testosterone-fueled madness; flawed males rebelling against a flawed male system. '4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days' strips itself of all that ego, and what remains is an uphill battle against patriarchal oppression, defiantly pushed along with the love, self-determination, and quiet intelligence inherent in femininity.

'4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days' was released in Australia in 2007, and is now available to rent on DVD.