They called it "the Romanian film" when it debuted at the 2007 Cannes film festival; a running dog from out of left-field that went on to trump its glitzier rivals even though no one could quite recall its name or who had made it. "Have you seen the Romanian film?" people would whisper inside the Palais. They might as well have been discussing a ghost.
"We'll never speak of this again," promise the characters at the end of Cristian Mungiu's taut, tight little nightmare. And although they are referring to a backstreet abortion, the director has pointed out that the line comes with a wider resonance – spotlighting the collective amnesia of those who lived through Ceauşescu-era Romania and are now keen to move on quickly, without a backward glance.
Small wonder they would prefer to forget. 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days plays the recent past as a foreign country, pinched and perilous and presided over by the likes of Mr Bebe (Vlad Ivanov), a black market businessman with his neat clothes and his property portfolio and his casual sideline in illegal terminations. Anamaria Marinca and Laura Vasilu play the two pensive students who fall into his clutches and Mungiu's film trails them through a long day's journey into night. This is a film that gives us hell in the guise of a cramped hotel room and an agonised middle-class dinner party.
4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days marked the high point of a Romanian "new wave" that also included The Death of Mr Lazarescu and 12:08 East of Bucharest. Mungiu grew up in the dog days of Ceauşescu and based his film on the true-life experience of a college friend. Those scary, straitened, rationed years have shaped his world-view and perhaps his way of working too. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days stands out as a model of economy: a lean, social-realist tour-de-force that contains nothing in the way of extraneous baggage. Not a single frame is wasted.
