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Foreign Realism

Jan 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Darroch Greer

Mungiu’s 4 Months marks the rebirth of Romanian cinema.

Communists are making good villains again. Former communist countries and satellites provide both settings and breeding grounds for some of the most potent cinema anywhere in the world today. Consider the success of The Lives of Others, the bleak and striking film set in former East Germany that won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film last year. Several months later, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a Romanian film directed by Cristian Mungiu for $600,000, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Most recently, it received Critics' Choice and Golden Globe nominations for Best Foreign Film.

The Cannes victory for 4 Months was not an aberration. Although Romania is only one of many countries being remade after decades under communism, it has long had an activist theater. A coterie of older Romanian filmmakers — most notably Lucian Pintilie and his film The Reenactment — is well respected by a new generation of filmmakers. In 2005, Cristi Puiu won the Un Certain Regard at Cannes for The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, and a year later Corneliu Porumboiu picked up the Camera d'Or for 12:08 East of Bucharest. In 2007, in addition to Mungiu's Palme d'Or, the late Cristian Nemscu won the Un Certain Regard for California Dreamin'. So, indeed, the victory of 4 Months confirmed what has been seen as a new wave of Romanian cinema.

The feelings raised by these new films are anything but nostalgic. The filmmakers strive for an unvarnished, if ironic, reality, as if they are bent on creating a gospel of cinema to record for all time the brutal inhumanity of living under a moribund autocratic system. “You find a way of talking about the small, very human misfortunes in everyday life brought by a grand dictatorship that was taking itself way too seriously,” Mungiu says. Now, with the success of 4 Months, Mungiu has the clout to write and produce six more films in an informal series he envisions being directed by young, talented Romanian directors.

The success of 4 Months lies in an austere aesthetic that focused the film's tiny budget on giving it the expanse of real life. As the title indicates, the story is about two college girls arranging for an illegal abortion during Nicolae Ceausescu's despotism in 1987 Romania. Mungiu was told the true story by a friend, and he was determined to capture the corrupt, hopeless spirit of the time visually.

With DP Oleg Mutu, he tested and settled on a 33-percent bleach bypass on the negative (photochemical) — although in the end they did a DI, after the resolution on the work print was disappointing. They also decided on a handheld style supported by an Easy Rig. “I never wanted to use Steadicam, because this is too beautiful and too smooth for me,” Mungiu says. “[In one of the opening shots] we were following the lead character that was walking down the dormitory hallway, and we were entering in the bathroom and going in one of the rooms, which is full of steam, and then we were going backwards with the camera. All in all, it's a 4-minute shot, which is very difficult to get because it's a big camera with lots of people around it trying to squeeze in very tiny doors in this location. And we thought this was a masterpiece of a shot. It was the longest shot we had ever done. But by the end of the film, we were doing 10-minute shots.”

For a key tragic scene, Mungiu flipped the usual director/DP equation, insisting that in order to respect historical truth, the streets of 1980s Romania had to be completely dark. “[Mutu] never told me, ‘Well, then we can't shoot.’ He thought about solutions,” Mungiu says. “And one of the solutions that he had for the night, for example, is to use the light carried on top of the camera.”

Respecting other historical truths involved the erection of old street lamps from the communist era or, at worst, using filters replicating the dim yellow color. When they couldn't afford to remove an advertising poster, Mungiu drove a water truck in front of it as the actress crossed the street, even though he had to replace all the sound.

Although this may sound like a lot of camera movement, it is not. The camera is a quiet presence, soaking in the scene as a spectator might. Mungiu and Mutu shot Super 35 Kodak Vision2 200T ASA 5217. (They had the print that went to Cannes specially printed on expensive Positive Premiere stock.) They began by opening up the frame with a 16mm lens, but they pulled back to 24mm and an occasional 20mm. For the proper perspective on interior locations, they erected scaffolding outside the buildings and cut a hole in the windows to insert the lens because, as Mungiu says, “that extra meter counted that much.”

They shot with available light as much as possible, often with the source in the shot. Mungiu did not want any shadows in the film, and twice he insisted on a 360-degree view. To help achieve this feeling of “pure life,” Mungiu eschews storyboards and blocks the scene with the actors in the morning, looking to place his camera in the dead center of the action. “As soon as we managed to stage a situation, we would be looking for a position for the camera that would be pretty much in the geometrical middle of the action. So we could, from one shot, just pan only when somebody was passing — because we never panned or tilted in this film unless something was triggering the action.

“I told [Mutu] from the beginning we will never tilt this camera in this film because it's not about this. This doesn't belong to the story and to the style. It's just this slice from their lives, and that's all we're interested in,” Mungiu says. “I encourage people to talk off camera or to stand up and deliver their lines, not following what is going to happen, because I want them to render this feeling that it's a bigger story than what you see.”

Although this formula may sound obtuse, onscreen it renders a realism that ups the ante of the story. “If you want to respect what you see in life in your film, you should fight against this kind of structuring — which comes from, you know, film school — where everything needs to have an answer. It's not like that. This effort of structuring and making everything logical is not very natural. It's not like how it happens. If you put this [unpredictability] into film, spectators won't feel what you did, but they get this feeling that it's true, and it's honest.”

After Mungiu was satisfied with the film, and after its spectacular victory at Cannes, he decided to release the film himself in his homeland so that as many people as possible could see it. There was a hitch: In a country of 20 million people, there are only 35 theaters.

“I took advantage of the moment where I am right now,” Mungiu says, “and I fundraised all summer, and I brought in some very important private people, and we finally organized and financed a caravan [like the ones] that toured Romania 100 years ago. All the technical equipment we brought from Germany, very modern, and a screen and a mobile projector with Dolby Surround. I screened this film for one month in Romania, touring the country in the big towns that don't have any cinema left.

“And the response we got from the public was unbelievable. Then, I decided to do something else, because this is the advantage of being your own producer. We sent a small documentary crew to just follow what was happening with this caravan. And it's a very nice kind of reportage documentary about several things, mostly how cinema can still be seen as — wow — something unbelievable on a big screen in front of people.”

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is the most successful film released in Romania, beating out American blockbusters — even Ratatouille — all at a meager 65,000 admissions (as of November).

“We wanted not to be spectacular or anecdotic [in our filmmaking]; just be simple and true, if you can,” Mungiu says. “It's very simple to trick people and have rhythm from the editing or emotion from the music. But try to do this without. See if you can.”

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.