Jornal da Mostra

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4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS, by Cristian Mungiu

SOCIALIST CLAUSTROPHOBIA WITH AMERICAN MORBIDNESS

Two features in competition at the 60th Cannes Festival, one from Romania and one from the USA, bring the uneasiness of a recent past. In the Romania of the 1980’s, almost at the end of the socialist era, its paranoids and claustrophobia, in 4 LUNI, 3 SAPTAMINI SI 2 ZILE/ 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS, by Cristian Mungiu. In the USA of the late 1960’s, the beginning of the investigations about the encrypted murders of a serial killer, in ZODIAC, by David Fincher, the director of bloody creepy memories (ALIEN3, SE7EN, FIGHT CLUB).

The Romanian Mungiu shows the nervous preparations and a clandestine abortion by two roommates in a Bucharest university. The title of the film registers the fetus’ life time. Besides being a high risk abortion, if discovered it would take to severe condemnation and prison of all involved. Behind ever-closed doors and under the domain of silence codes and encrypted combinations, the plan will be nervously and coldly executed.

The executant is a special character, a mixture of doctor and monster, a clandestine type, as if belonging to a parallel society. He behaves with violence and discretion.

With touches of cruelty and infamy. Even clandestine, he is the symbol of things that society officially denies to its young or old citizens. Cristian Mungiu approaches his reconstitution exercise to socialist in-loco and real-time cinema by Polish master Krisztof Kieslowski.

ZODIAC also walks on the side of secret societies and encrypted codes. The film locks us in a San Francisco newspaper room, when American youngsters react to Vietnam war or engage in new political movements. Even at the newspaper, we won’t see anything like the couple of reporters who investigate Watergate. We are at the police editorial department, which dominates the news with the murders committed by a maniac. The clues, the deaths and threats follow one another and the police aren’t able to reach its executioner.

If it weren’t for the obsession of cartoonist Robert Graysmith, on duty at the paper, and the book he wrote – on which Fincher based his film – the case would have been forgotten for a long time. And why remember it now? Besides the flow of encrypted letters the assassin sends to the newspapers, we see that the enthusiasm of the press and the police is tragically overcome by the strength of new events. Society will keep on being ill. But we will only hear of new illnesses.

More information in :
www.festival-cannes.org

English version: Laura Rebessi