In Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days the Romanian actress Anamaria Marinca plays Otilia, a college student in her early 20s in Bucharest, who, by the story's end, has the disillusioned gaze of someone who isn't young at all.
The movie, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year, is set on a single day in 1987 in Romania, two years before the violent end of the Ceausescu regime, which had outlawed both abortion and contraception. Otilia's best friend, Gabita, is pregnant and barely capable of facing the brute reality of her circumstances. It falls to Otilia to wheedle, bribe and contend with the grotesque demands of the leather-jacketed abortionist who creepily calls himself Mr Bebe, and to provide what comfort she can to her hapless friend.
At a New York Film Festival luncheon last month, Marinca, 29, right, appeared spritelike, slim, pretty and ebullient, quoting a favorite writer ("As Ondaatje says, 'Biography is everything.''') and bubbling with curiosity and ideas.
On the screen her transformation is remarkable. Tense and, initially at least, briskly competent, her Otilia looks tall, strong and rather plain, while Marinca's quick intelligence is evident in the character's alert, expressive face. At first Otilia seems like a typical college girl: eagerly examining some American cosmetics for secret sale in her dorm, giving her boyfriend a good-luck snuggle before he takes an important exam. But as she navigates the darker irregularities of a dangerous black market transaction in a severely deranged society, her youthful resilience loses its elasticity, gradually giving way to something bruised and worse.
At the festival luncheon Marinca pointed out that Otilia emerges from the ordeal knowing her own strength as never before. She does, but in a last close-up, her still face and anguished eyes suggest the terrible cost.
The film won the top prize at the European Film Awards in Berlin.
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