Romania On The Table
The Age
Friday October 19, 2007
Craig Mathieson speaks to director Cristian Mungiu about the shadow of Ceausescu.
Cristian Mungiu is standing on a New York street and thinking about Romania. The young filmmaker, whose second feature 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May, has just left the Museum of Modern Art on West 53rd Street, where he walked through Lost Vanguard: Soviet Modernist Architecture 1922-32.He describes the exhibition, photographs of the decaying architectural achievements of Russia's post-revolutionary period, as "absolutely fantastic", admitting that the building's brutally grand ideals and their subsequent symbolic and literal collapse draws comparison with the travails of his homeland, whose four decades of totalitarian Communist Party rule ended after a popular uprising in 1989.Mungiu's film unfolds in the final years of Nicolae Ceausescu's regime but it is less about state repression than personal survival. Over the course of 24 hours, where everyday gains must be negotiated and every symbol of freedom - right down to a woman's control of her body - is negated, a pair of university students try to get an illegal abortion. Passive, pregnant Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) frets and her practical best friend Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) prepares a barren hotel room as they await Mr Bebe (Vlad Ivanov), who will secretly perform the procedure."Working on this film we discovered - although we never thought about it when we started - that everyone has something to say on this subject," says the 39-year-old writer and director. "So many women in Romania over the age of 40 have said to me, 'This is my life.Thank you for writing so openly about.' The other reaction, unfortunately was, 'That's nothing compared to what happened to me.' " Shot with long, emotionally uncompromising takes, a steadily mounting sense of horror as the situation spins out of control and an atmosphere of grim, unyielding repression, 4Months, 3Weeks and 2Days shows how the deprivation of freedom assiduously corrupts a country. Ceausescu and the all-powerful secret police, the Securitate, are never mentioned by name but they hover over every social transaction. People are suspicious and exploitative; those with a skerrick of privilege enjoy their gain."What I really wanted was not to make a feature that talked and directed words about how we lived then but to show the depression and grim atmosphere of the time," says Mungiu. "There are films now that are set during the period or talk about their consequences but not very directly.People my age, approaching 40, are at the point where they want to look back and tell a story about their youth. Those stories are generally personal and not directly about the regime - in the '90s Romanian filmmakers were really trying to settle something with the regime but after a period they stopped telling actual stories and people stopped watching them."In the late '80s, Mungiu was a university student. The film's plot is based on events he learnt about at the time, although he only considered making a film in the past few years, as he began planning another feature, Tales from the Golden Age, which is intended to be a collection of short films about life under Ceausescu. One of the young women whose story inspired 4Months saw it (Mungiu has lost touch with the other real-life protagonist) and told him that she liked it because he got right the emotion of the day."I myself was living quite a normal life and trying to survive the period," Mungiu says. "We never thought communism would come to an end, so we were just trying to deal with each problem as it came to us. We never conceptualised about communism or freedom - we just wanted to get through each day. That's why the film is from the perspective of someone who doesn't identify communism with what's happening to them."What adds to the film's force is Mungiu's refusal to offer the audience a moral judgement or use technique to abate discomfort. His film neither expects sympathy nor demands outrage, with the former journalist letting the narrative speak for itself."I was trying to abstain from putting across my point of view, because I've already made those judgements by choosing this story and putting it across to people. I was trying not to make judgements," he says.The acclaim guaranteed by success at Cannes made Mungiu a national figure in Romania. Last month he released the film himself, booking prints into all 35 of the nation's cinemas and organising a bus to visit small towns for screenings to meet demand. The film topped the Romanian box office, a commercial reflection of the critical consensus internationally that films such as 4 Months and 2005's The Death of Mr Lazarescu, directed by Cristi Puiu, constitute an important new stream of European realist cinema."You have a different responsibility that comes after films that have received international recognition.You have to think about cinema and have a vision," says Mungiu. But he admits that Romania's New Wave is less about shared accomplishment and more about competition. A director acclaimed abroad can garner well-paid work at home making television advertisements through their production company. What he won't be doing, despite the charms of New York City, is following the well-worn path of European directors relocating to America."I get a lot of phone calls," he concedes with a wry laugh. "The message seems to be that it would make a big difference if I came to live here but I won't. I wouldn't say that I'll never make a film here but I'm an author and I'm not entirely sure they understand what an author is and how they have to be free to do what they do."
© 2007 The Age