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Looking plainly at life under Communist rule MICHAEL POSNER >From Wednesday's Globe and Mail October 31, 2007 at 4:05 AM EDT Making films in Romania is not like making films in Hollywood. Just ask Cristian Mungiu, 39-year-old director and writer of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, the smart and dark feature that won the prestigious Palme d'or award at the Cannes Film Festival last spring and opens across Canada this week. Mungiu is the first Romanian director to win the award for a feature. First of all, Mungiu explains, there's the little matter of budgets. The average cost of making a Hollywood movie is more than $65-million. Mungiu shot his for less than $900,000. And, he notes, he forfeited his own directorial and scripting fees to help cut costs. He doesn't make a living off feature films in Romania; he survives there by shooting TV commercials. But what 4 Months demonstrates yet again is that powerful filmmaking is not dependent on lavish budgets. The story is set in a Romanian city during the Communist era. Otilia, a young college student, is desperately trying to arrange an illegal abortion for Gabita, her terrified roommate, who is well into her fourth month of pregnancy. If their abortion plan is discovered, they will go to jail. The resourceful Otilia finds a cheap hotel and a grim abortionist, Mr. Bebe, and scrounges up enough money to pay him. What follows is as harrowing and real as you might imagine. It's a dead-certain nominee for an Academy Award as best foreign film, although Mungiu's scrupulous adherence to slice-of-life verisimilitude may stand in the way of actually winning. Mungiu's camera captures the grim, pervasive greyness that weighed on Communist societies, but this is not intended to be, nor is it, a political document. Indeed, 4 Months is the first in a projected series of films by Mungiu that will chronicle everyday life under communism without any direct reference to it. "And I want it to be, as much as possible, shot from the perspectives that existed then," he says, "how people acted and thought, not from the perspectives that exist today." Born in Iasi, a university town near the Russian border, Mungiu is the son of a professor of medicine and the younger brother of noted political scientist Alina Mungiu-Pippidi. He originally planned to be a writer or a journalist. "It was impossible to study film in those days and I wanted to avoid going into the army, so I studied literature," he says. After graduating in 1998, he taught English for a while, then moved to Bucharest and started writing for newspapers: "It was an exciting period to be a journalist, especially after the Berlin Wall came down." He moved into radio and then to a TV phone-in show that provided a forum for the long-suppressed voices of Romanians. He got his first practical cinematic training by working with American and European film crews that came to shoot feature films after the fall of communism in 1989 and made his first feature, Occident, in 2002. Selected as part of the Director's Fortnight at Cannes, it dealt with the desire of Romanians to emigrate, told from three different points of view. "But I never like to impose a theme on my films," Mungiu says. "I start with stories of people I know. Eventually, a wider meaning emerges, but I don't start there." His facility with English once earned him a gig as a screenwriter for a projected Dennis Hopper film. After meeting Hopper in Bucharest, Mungiu was invited to the actor's Wilmington, N.C., home to write. Nothing became of the project, but U.S. embassy officials in Bucharest were so impressed by the invitation alone that they gave him a 10-year visa to visit America. "It was a wonderful experience and I learned a lot from it," he says. "But it shows you how you can be closer to filmmaking living in Romania than in America. Hopper's funding fell through and that was that." The idea for 4 Months came from his knowledge of a young woman who had faced a comparable predicament. "I'd heard the story, but I never thought I'd make a film out of it," he says. "Some years passed, and then I ran into the person who had told me about it, just when I was looking for a story relevant to my generation. So much anger and frustration rose up in me, thinking about what had happened, that I saw the potential for a film." He wrote the first of several drafts in a few weeks in early 2006, then rewrote the script repeatedly during the shoot. Most of the lead actors, though professional, were not that well known in Romania. "I don't want generally to work with people who are recognized as 'actors,' because then they are actors and not the characters," he explains. Mungiu is a very hands-on director, right down to demonstrating the actors' body movements and voice intonations. "You can't ask somebody to be emotional unless you can feel the emotion yourself," he says, "so I'm trying to communicate it to them." His film follows two days in the lives of these characters, but their stories do not, he says, end with the film. "It's not an accident that I start and end in the film in the middle of a conversation," he says. "I don't know what happens to them afterward, but their lives will continue." His goal had been to have the film accepted for competition at Cannes. When it was, the buzz was so positive that Mungiu spent several days there going from one press interview to the next. By the end of the festival, there was so much sentiment in its favour that "I would have been frankly disappointed not to get the award," he says. It's not unusual for successful European films to get a Hollywood remake, and that, Mungiu allows, could happen. In the meantime, he is more than happy to have a wide North American release. 4 Months has played to wide acclaim in Romania, but not in a conventional fashion. In a country with 22 million people, there are just 35 cinemas, so capitalizing on his new-found fame abroad, Mungiu raised funds to organize a travelling caravan to take the film to regions of the country where people would not otherwise have a chance to see it. C Copyright 2007 CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc. ---------------------------- Vali "Noble blood is an accident of fortune; noble actions are the chief mark of greatness." (Carlo Goldoni) "When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace." (Jimi Hendrix) Aboneaza-te la <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ngo_list> ngo_list: o alternativa moderata (un pic) la [ngolist] Please consider the environment - do you really need to print this email?
