As I was coming out of a screening of 4 Months, 3
Weeks, 2 Days, as shaken up by the experience as I imagine everyone
who has seen the film must be, I accidentally fell into step behind
a couple — she in her 20s or early 30s, he considerably older,
both elegantly dressed — who were making their reaction to what
they had seen a matter for public remark.
Actually, it was the woman who was doing most of the talking
while the man, in a considerably lower voice, sounded as if he was
trying to pour oil upon troubled waters. He probably was, too. She
was saying that the entire Supreme Court should be made to see this
movie, as this is what our country would look like if Roe v.
Wade were to be overturned. That was why, in case anyone
wanted to know, she had at some demonstration or other been known
to scream in public — she was not far off it now — as she had
joined with other women to keep abortion legal, and why she would
be doing it again.
As we parted ways on coming out of the building, I heard the
word “Bush” more than once, and not in a nice tone, but I missed
the rest of this lady’s harangue and all of the reaction to it of
her softer-voiced companion. Hers, I thought, was an understandable
response to what must be one of the most harrowing depictions of an
abortion ever shown on film and a picture that well deserved the
Palme d’Or that it won at Cannes last year. Yet it seemed odd that
all she could see of it afterwards was the fact that, having taken
place in Romania during the dying days of the oddly puritanical
Ceausescu regime, now nearly 20 years in the past, the abortion had
been an illegal one. However horrible its illegality had made it —
and that’s pretty horrible — it’s hard to see how that could so
completely blind someone to the horror — for such it also
certainly is — of the abortion itself. Such are the powers of
ideology.
To be fair, the Romanian film-maker, Cristian Mungiu, had to
some extent encouraged such a reaction by stressing the predatory
nature of the abortionist, who bears the grimly comical nom de
guerre of Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov) and who uses in vile and
degrading ways his advantage — created by the fact that they are
engaged in a criminal conspiracy — over the two frightened college
students, Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) and Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) who
employ him. Yet Mr. Mungiu, unlike so many of his pro-choice
feminist fans, is at least as interested in the evils of the
unnamed “procedure” as he is in those that ensue from its
illegality. Naturally this makes him more difficult to classify
ideologically than either side in the abortion debate would like
him to be, but as the woman I overheard demonstrated, there is
nothing to stop the dedicated ideologue from simply ignoring the
parts of the film she doesn’t care to see.
These include, it should be said up front, an unblinking,
unabashed shot of an aborted fetus. This, Mr. Mungiu was quoted in
the press as saying, “makes a point — people should be aware of
the consequences of their decisions.” Just so. But there is more to
his film than this. It’s hard to tell about Gabita, who is weak,
sly and manipulative, as willing to take advantage of her friend as
Bebe is to take advantage of both of them, but for Otilia the
terrible price she is willing to pay for her friend’s abortion is
all part of her more general determination to do whatever is
necessary to break free of what the totalitarian communist regime
has made the prison of her peasant origins. On more than one
occasion, she tells us that she is studying “Tech” at the
university because Tech students are not sent to the country.
Gabita comes from the same rural hometown as she, and her loyalty
to her, for which she pays such a high price, seems to be part and
parcel of her ambition to improve her own lot in life.
Mr. Mungiu has also explained that what he was trying to convey
was that, “Because of the pressure of the regime, women and
families were so much concerned about not being caught for making
an illegal abortion that they didn’t give one minute of thought
about the moral issue.” It makes sense, I guess. Which of us can be
sure how we might act if we were subject to the desperation created
by living under a totalitarian regime? That desperation serves in
the film, by motivating the abortion, to reinforce the pro-life
view of the momentousness of such an act. Or, to put it another
way, I wonder what could have been the excuse of the well-dressed
fan of Roe v. Wade whom I overheard for her
giving not one minute’s thought to the moral issue? She does seem
rather to have missed the point, doesn’t she?
In fact, you could argue that Mr. Mungiu is making the case that
abortion should be not only legal but compulsory for such a
feckless nincompoop as Gabita. Here is a woman who has learned to
exploit her own helpless stupidity in order to make other people do
things for her. She stumbled into getting pregnant and then she
stumbled into an abortion, an abortion for which poor Otilia has to
pay all the considerable ancillary expenses. A eugenicist might be
just as enthusiastic about this movie, as ready to see it as
confirming his own views about the world, as the pro-choice woman I
followed out of the cinema. Such people, this hypothetical
eugenicist might say — if anyone could be got to admit to being a
eugenicist these days — such people as Gabita should be sterilized
or, failing that, subjected to compulsory abortion on every one of
the doubtless many occasions when she will fall pregnant through
her own heedlessness and stupidity.
In other words, there are several ways to forget or ignore or
literally to annihilate the innocent party to this transaction.
Arguably, by making their movies all about the feelings of those
who have the child’s fate in their hands, the makers of such
ostensibly pro-life Hollywood films as Knocked Up and
Juno have also taken them. In Juno, the unborn child’s
fingernail is enough to motivate the heroine’s “choice,” but this
makes it seem merely whimsical and therefore indirectly and even
paradoxically confirms the pro-choice view just as the opposite
“choice” in 4 Months does the pro-life view. At one point,
Otilia stops to admire some “cute” new-born kittens on her way to
arrange her friend’s abortion, as if to remind us that the
sentimentalism that comes so easily to Hollywood is an irrelevance
in the lives of those who are forced to look at things as they
really are. There is nothing trivial about the act we are forced to
witness in Mr. Mungiu’s movie, and that makes it both more morally
compelling and more true to life.
