During the final days of the communist Ceausescu regime, two Romanian college students are preparing for a day unlike any the other girls in their dormitory will face. While most run around the building bartering for hot showers or a fresh pack of American cigarettes, Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) is heading into town to secretly meet with a doctor.

Anamarica Marinca in IFC Films' 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

Not for herself, mind you, but for her best friend Gabita (Laura Vasiliu). She is pregnant, maybe further along than she knows, and the last thing in the world she needs right now is a child. The student isn’t ready to be a mother, and the boy who got her this way isn’t ready to be a dad, and the only option open to her is one the government doesn’t allow. Over the course of 24-hours the women’s lives are irrevocably changed, this hunt for an illegal abortion coming at an horrific price neither of them could have anticipated.

Brutal, uncompromising, shocking, masterful, these and many other words come to mind after watching writer and director Cristian Mungiu’s stunning 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. The winner of the 2007 Palme d’Or at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, the movie is an instant classic, watching it as kinetically withering an experience as anything I any I've ever experienced.

So much of this film sticks with you in ways you can’t even begin to imagine. No matter which end of the abortion divide you stand upon it is hard to not be moved by this tragically devastating journey of friendship and heartbreak. The price these girls pay because of a government policy designed to marginalize and silence them in their time of need is absolutely demoralizing, the results of their ultimate decisions trying to overcome these policies even more so.

Mungiu allows the events of the tale to sneak up on you to the point that when the knockout blow comes you aren't prepare to receive it. With documentary-like precision, he and cinematographer Oleg Mutu (The Death of Mr. Lazarescu) present things with a matter-of-fact verisimilitude that feels as certain as bedrock. It is as if a real woman’s frazzled day-in-the-life was secretly captured for posterity, the unimaginable brought to fruition before our eyes and the only thing we can do about it is softly cry in the willowy sleeve of our jacket when it comes to an end.

The film also introduces a villain anyone who catches the film is never likely to forget. Think Javier Bardem is scary in No Country for Old Men? Wait until you see the kindly, self-assured and soft-spoken Dr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov). He lays out his cause with conviction and with simple directness. He talks in short, almost comforting sentences with a gentle cadence oozing sincerity. But what he wants for payment is beyond comprehension, the lengths he’ll go to get it the fodder for never ending nightmares.

But it is the women who own this picture. Mungiu focuses on them and them alone, and while Marinca is most definitely the main player it is both women who make the film resonate as crstaline as it does. Both she and Vasiliu have a chemistry that’s hard to define, even tougher to explain, yet feels as real and as genuine as the one I have with my own best friend. Theirs is a friendship women talk so much about yet so rarely get to experience, making the sacrifices one makes for the other even that much more difficult to endure.

For me, all of this called to mind the almost equally stirring 1998 French drama The Dreamlife of Angels from director Erick Zonca. It, too, felt almost like a documentary, also revolving around the friendship of two young women dealing with pressures and crises almost impossible to fathom. But whereas that film revolved around weeks, this one takes place in a single day, this one snapshot of two lives broken and damaged maybe beyond repair so repugnantly powerful it almost defies a more thorough examination.

The travesty in all of this, of course, is that 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is one of the best, if not the best, films of 2007. It is a picture for the time capsule, one to which so many others are forever going to be judged. And yet those responsible for coming up with the foreign film shortlist for Academy Award consideration didn’t even think to include it in the final pictures being voted on for a nomination.

How is that even possible? I understand being shaken by what Mungiu has accomplished here. I can even understand being so shattered by the picture as to never wanting to endure its travails ever again. What I cannot understand is refusing to see its brilliance, being unable to fathom the sheer cinematic craftsmanship that went into bringing it to life. This is as meticulously and as intelligently constructed, and as brilliantly acted, a cinematic experience a person will ever get a chance to witness. Not being able to see that isn’t just silly, in the case of the nominating committee it’s almost a crime.

In the end, the most difficult moments of the picture end up having nothing to do with watching Gabita go through her abortion or seeing Otilia bravely try to deal with its aftermath. Instead, it is a dinner party, a supposedly happy night of birthday presents and celebratory toasts that causes the most pain and suffering. The indifference of fellow humans, the continued insistence that only the fittest deserve to survive and those at the bottom exist only to serve those at the top, that is what ultimately broke my heart with silence being the most destructive and painful weapon of them all.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days isn’t an easy sit, true, but it does remind us that choice, and the freedom to have it, is a luxury worth fighting – maybe even dying – for and that friendship is a gift which should never be taken for granted. The film is a masterpiece, and even if I never see it again it is one motion picture I guarantee you I’m never likely to forget.

Film Rating: êêêê (out of 4)

Additional Links:

-  4 Months, 3 Week and 2 Days Theatrical Trailer