Must-See

This has just jumped to the top of my movies-to-see list.

In “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” a ferocious, unsentimental, often brilliantly directed film about a young woman who helps a friend secure an abortion, the camera doesn’t follow the action, it expresses consciousness itself. This consciousness — alert to the world and insistently alive — is embodied by a young university student who, one wintry day in the late 1980s, helps her roommate with an abortion in Ceausescu’s Romania when such procedures were illegal, not uncommon and too often fatal. It’s a pitiless, violent story that in its telling becomes a haunting and haunted intellectual and aesthetic achievement.

It’s getting great reviews, but interestingly, the director is saying that the film isn’t about abortion — it’s about totalitarianism. That statement particularly struck me, because women’s bodies are so often used as social and political pawns — something that occasionally gets lost in the reproductive rights debate. Abortion in Romania is one example; reproductive rights in places like China, mandatory covering in Afghanistan, and natalist policies in WWII-era Germany are also illustrative.

Hopefully I’ll see it soon, and I’ll post a review.