A film about illegal abortion in Ceausescu's Romania recalls a system Romanians would sooner forget, writes Philip Ó Ceallaigh
Palme d'Or-winning films at the Cannes Film Festival divide the critics. But Romanian director Cristian Mungiu's 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days is proving more controversial than most.
"The dignity of the audience receives a new blow with this Palme d'Or-winning film: a dramatic sign of the return to barbarism of our individual and collective consciences," was the verdict of L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's official newspaper. Indeed, many will be troubled that a story centred on the procurement of an illegal abortion in the last days of the Ceausescu dictatorship does not explicitly condemn abortion, and thereby condones it.
But Mungiu is not a didacticist. He tells a story about individuals and the difficult time in which they lived. His film is a reminder that good art strives to be true to life, and that life is complex.
"You can interpret the film in many ways, and I'm glad that it has been interpreted in sometimes diametrically opposite ways," says Mungiu. "I didn't set out - at least not very consciously - to make a film about the past, or even about abortion. I wanted to make a film that was moving, that moved me in the first instance, and to make a film about how life was for us when I was 20. I wanted to make a film about my generation."
THE FILM FOLLOWS the central character, Otilia, through a single winter's day. It is the late 1980s, a provincial Romanian city, and Otilia is a student. She has lived all her life under a dictatorship. Abortion is illegal, but she is going to help her friend and fellow student Gabita obtain one.
"There is the obligation as a film-maker," says Mungiu, "to be coherent and have a style of storytelling that can hold the spectator for two hours, at the same time using the means of art house cinema and achieving the effect of a commercial film. It's not a simple matter. For me, as a film-maker, honesty consists in not exploiting those tricks you have at your disposal for extracting an emotion. It's very easy to put on violins to make people cry."
In a world of cinematography given up to effect, this is subtle, understated work. None of the characters discuss the dictatorship, but the fact of it informs their every move, their every word. All the important conversations are hushed, barely above a whisper. You feel more like an eavesdropper than a viewer.
"I'm a child of the Decree," says Mungiu, who was born in 1968. He is referring to Ceausescu's Decree 770, which prohibited abortion and produced a brief population boom.
Romania produced no contraceptives and none were imported, and by 1966 the rate of abortions exceeded that for live births by an estimated four to one. Ceausescu decided something had to be done. "The fetus is the property of the entire society," the dictator proclaimed. "Anyone who avoids having children is a deserter who abandons the imperative of national continuity." There was a simultaneous crackdown on divorce - there were only 28 divorces in 1967, compared to 26,000 the preceding year.
Women under the age of 45 were regularly rounded up at their places of work and study for medical examinations, so that pregnancies could be monitored and brought to term.
Women and their infants were the immediate victims of this ideological imperative to procreate. The country's hospitals, already ill-equipped, were unable to deal with the baby boom. Inadequate nutrition and prenatal care endangered many women and babies. Infant mortality increased to 83 deaths per thousand (against a western European average of 10 per thousand). Babies born under 1.5kg - about one in 10 births - were classified as miscarriages and denied treatment.
By the time the mid-1970s came around, birth rates were back to pre-Decree levels. For all the coercive measures in place, Romanian communism had managed to create a black market in abortion, just as it created a black market in everything else. Except that now an abortion cost several months' wages. If you were caught you went to prison. If it went wrong you could die. The Securitate - the feared secret police - patrolled the hospitals, ensuring that women suffering from blood poisoning from botched abortions divulged names before they received treatment. In some cases, especially if the woman had been assisted by friends or family members, she would not talk. The patient would slip into a coma, then die, as the doctors watched on.
Ceausescu had an ideological commitment to the family, but there wasn't very much space in which to raise one. An urban working class had been created on command, and the new proletariat was herded into hastily built, crowded apartment blocks. And as the 1970s dragged into the 1980s, and Ceausescu attempted to pay back the country's debt by starving his population and turning off their heating in winter, women continued to risk prison or death in order to avoid having children.
The desperate problem of Romania's "orphanages", which became so apparent after the overthrow of communism in 1989, was in reality a result of mothers surrendering to the state children they could not afford to feed.
BUT MUNGIU'S FILM is not a harangue against a system - a system that foreigners have trouble imagining and that Romanians would sooner forget. His characters do not discuss the regime they live under. They are too busy struggling under it, silently. It is this lack of didactic context - in relation to abortion solely - that upset the Vatican and led L'Osservatore Romano to call the film "sordid and redundant" where the fetus is spoken of "as if it were an object and not a human being, called to life only to be sacrificed, killed and thrown in the rubbish."
And indeed, the abortion at the centre is never discussed, either between Otilia and Gabita themselves or at the political level by their society. The final words of the film, spoken by Otilia to Gabita, are: "Let's never talk about this again." And this is where the matter rested, for the millions of women who had illegal abortions. Their stories were consigned to silence by the illegality of the act and personal shame. And in silence the matter remained - until this film was made.
Was Mungiu conscious that his film would provide a catharsis for many women, and possibly even for his society? "I thought, first of all, that it would be a catharsis for me."
AT 39 YEARS of age, Mungiu has the perspective with which to judge the changes his country has gone through. The first half of his life was spent growing up under the dictatorship, the second half in the creaking semi-democracy and anarchic capitalism since its overthrow. There was no South Africa-style "Commission for Truth and Reconciliation" in Romania following the 1989 coup that passed for a "revolution". Nobody has been called to account for the crimes of the past, except for Ceausescu and his wife, swiftly executed and therefore unable to face a trial in which names would be named and the circles of blame ripple outward. It is as if no crimes were committed. In a society eager to embrace the future, Mungiu sees one afraid to face up to the past.
"We're the product of the education and kind of life we lived then," he says. "We pay very little attention to how greatly our ethical and moral principles are influenced by the education and propaganda we lived through . . . I'm very disappointed that this film provokes a debate about principles and ethics in every country I go to, but doesn't provoke any in Romania. Everybody here is struck by the 'success' of the film and the international recognition. But nobody sees it as a criticism of the society in which we live . . . If the Cannes jury had been made up of Romanians, I never would have taken the prize."
And yet, despite Mungiu's frustration, a segment of the Romanian population is watching his film, and talking, and thinking, and you cannot help but feel that a society that produces and views such stories about itself - even for a small audience - is healthier than one that does not.
It has been a long journey, since the fall of communism, for the Romanian film industry to create films that people want to watch - including films that give a perspective on the past. Under Ceausescu, directors churned out nationalistic/historical costume dramas and, after the "revolution" of 1989, the same compromised directors continued to produce films for which there was no market.
"Young directors were not allowed to make films, full stop," says Mungiu of the 1990s. "Nobody new debuted, ever, unless they were chosen by the government because they didn't represent any threat."
4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days is indeed a return to barbarism - it is a return to the period of barbarism that Mungiu's generation lived through. A period of violence, desperation and lies, when language became useless because nothing could be expressed or shown directly. And Cristian Mungiu has found the language, in a simple story, to evoke how that period touched individual lives. He has made a brave film that finally speaks about what the rest of us are content to leave unspoken.
Philip Ó Ceallaigh lives in Romania. His short story collection Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse is published by Penguin. He wrote the English-language subtitles for the film 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days, which opens here next Friday