Probably you heard already about the Romanian Cristian Mungiu's film, which won the Golden Palm in Cannes and the best film prize at the European Film Awards, wasn't nominated for the best foreign film for Oscar (hmm, definitely doesn't fit to the red carpet..), and which one of the best but at least definitely one of the most powerful and effective movies from 2007.It seems that sooner or later all the post-communist countries find their history. Everybody tells 'The Story' with the accent which fits the most to the past's particular historical atmosphere. The mistrustful East-German past, poisoned by the Stasi in von Donnersmarck's Das Leben der Anderen, or the Hungarian's 'jolliest barrack' in Török's Moszkva tér told the most authentic way about this period, not with their stories but with their voices and feelings. And here comes Mungiu's film.
The story is unbelievable simple as it used to be with perfect films. The student Gabi (dark hair) is pregnant who would like to get rid of her unwanted fetus. Her roommate Otilia (the blond one) is trying to help the weak and desperate Gabi, at all hazards. Hazards? Did I forget to tell that the story is taken place in the end of the eighties Romania, where the abortion was wholly illegal?
"Don't be so superstitious, we aren't live in the Middle Ages.' – says Otilia, and she has right, but not in the way how she meant it. The end phase of Ceausescu's (the similarity with the hotel receptionist cannot be a coincidence) Romania is even worse than any historical time. The abortion – all with its terrible details – becomes only an apropos: the movie is about one of the most terrible era's last years, where some years later the unbelievable accurately depicted desperateness led to the "revolution" in December 1989.
How this Romania looked like? Mungiu's microscopically sharp milieu tells more than his abortion-story in the foreground. Just look at the faces on the local bus, see the conversation with the receptionist at the hotel lobby, look at the withering flower on the table, or examine the young girls' sear bodies. "Don't slam the door!" – shouts the "doctor". Just like my father said with our crappy but adored Dacia (same model, same color... yeah, the orange one), and – unfortunately – as I used to say to my girlfriend, too. Bad reflex, directly from the eighties. You can abort your child, but not you memories and bad habits. Terrible.
Or even more: TERRIBLE. Really. You will feel yourself sick after watching this film. But you have to watch it. It shows how terrible process is to make an abortion in 1987, but hey, you should imagine then how terrible might be to keep the child these times. Plus as Mungiu told in the Sight & Sound (January, p.12): "a terminated pregnancy was an act of resistence, a victory over the regime."
I believe that the opening and the closing scenes are already filmhistorical moments. The parallelism of the fishes' and the whole society's aquarium are unbelievable strong. And then Otilia looks into the camera. Shot. Black. The end. BOOM!
10/10
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