4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days

4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days won the Palm d'Or at Cannes this year, so you've been wondering whether or not you want to see it when it's released in January. Two things. One: The movie is brilliant. Shot so convincingly you can feel the grime of every despairing, gloomy corner in its Romania of 1987, it feels like a documentary, has no music, and is filled with believable, natural characters in crushing circumstances. Under communist rule, even the simplest action, early on it’s buying soap, requires a complex network of favors, borrowed money, half-truths, negotiations with black market dealers, and half lies. A scene with the main character, Otilia, riding a bus without a ticket shows both the instant willingness of strangers to help each other against the state and their miserable satisfaction in watching them suffer. That’s the other thing: The movie is absolutely brutal. It captures the automatic tyranny of the crushed, as if the characters were saying, If I have the opportunity to exploit you, obviously I must take it, otherwise how does the system work? This ranges from the prolonged cat-and- mouse game of hotel clerks who "lose" reservations then "may" be able to help get a room but ultimately don't, to the (illegal) abortionist's calm explanation that in addition to his extortionist fees he needs something more from both the pregnant young woman and her friend, Otilia. Immediately after being violated, Otilia must go to meet her boyfriend's parents for the first time, at his mother's 48th birthday party, a small, friendly, squabbling dinner of unhappy doctors and their wives, and, when they're finally alone together in his room, her boyfriend doesn't understand why she doesn't want to have sex. You may have seen suspense in a movie before, but you haven't seen a young woman alone in the dark, in an unfamiliar, menacing  neighborhood, trying to find a place to hide a fetus where neither police nor dogs will find it. The Romanian director, Cristian Mungiu, says this movie is the first in his series Tales from the Golden Age.