Social life as terror: Cristian Mungiu, "4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days"

"Four Months, Three Weeks, and Two Days," by Cristian Mungiu, may be the best Roumanian film. Apparently shot partly with a green filter which makes the image look a bit sick, the film sustains a tension throughout, with not only the abortionist but the boyfriend and other people trying to cope and treating the people around them as guardedly as if, in a society whose state apparatus suspects all its citizens, the latter must all suspect each other. A friend of mine who grew up in East Germany said to me, “You Americans wonder if the other person, or you yourself, are a boy or a girl. We would always wonder if someone was Stasi or not Stasi.” (Roumania also had a pervasive state secret police, the Securitate.)

Ottilia, the heroine, knows she is living in a world where everyone more or less is just trying to live an ordinary life in what is plainly enough recognizable as a repressive environment. In this world she will try to do one good deed: help her timid roommate get an illegal abortion from a verbally abusive man who turns out to want money less than power, which may also mean literally fucking with Ottilia (who undresses and complies, as if it were, which it is, part of the business transaction). The film starts in a dorm room (the protagonist and her girlfriend are students) which may be partly an allegorical image of Roumania's relatively grim form of socialism. Almost everything anyone says has undercurrents of the tension that results from the fact that no one can be very certain of anyone. The contemporary ‘national security state’ at its most annoying and boring—that is, its production of ennui—at its limit will render most interactions redolent with a sense of policing and being policed; that is, no one can be trusted. The state takes care of what you need so well or badly that life is 'every man for himself.' The film makes Sartre's “No Exit,” a plainly fantastic play set in occupied France with obvious referents to it, seem like a romantic comedy of the kind people of my generation remember from television. The motif of abortion (illegal in Roumania then) may also have larger significances, including in the fact that her boyfriend does not want to use contraception, talk of which the film begins with. Real and possible relationships. To make them happen or not happen. In the context of the overwhelming need to just survive--or succeed in a profession, which is the principal topic of conversation at Ottilia's boyfriend's house at a dinner with his parents, shot in front of the bookcase that reminds the viewer of the ostensible importance of intellectual culture under Communism, at least for the dominant class of professional workers that Ottilia and other students are hoping to enter, whose principal fear seems to be the boredom of provincial life, since the state decides where people will be posted to work. The family members and their friends sit close around the table, eating and drinking, and with the kind of intimacy that may be peculiar to societies that are in some sense highly closed, with opportunities that are quite limited, with the consequence that people may take for granted a certain bitterness from which family and close friends can provide a welcome refuge. The film describes an ordeal, but more profoundly than its events, it portrays a world. It is a past world, now. Or is it?

And what can one in this kind of situation do about it? Try to forget it, never again mentioning it? At the film’s inescapable allegorical level lies the question of (broad social/historical) trauma and the remembrance of or working-through it that traumatic memories always invoke.

Few films in the rich canon of dissident cinema made in or (like the Roumanian wave this film was part of) about Communist Europe, reach and sustain this level of tension. Jan Nemec’s “Diamonds of the Night” and “Report on the Party and the Guests” (Czechoslovakia) come close perhaps; and even more so Andrzej Zulawski’s "The Third Part of the Night,” set in wartime Poland; and, in the manner particular to him, the films of Hungary’s Bela Tarr with their unrelenting and tedious bleakness.

In extra-historical and anti- (and pseudo-) political America, we think all trauma and suffering are psychological, unless it is authorized by an ideology which entitles you to claim your identity and wear it as a t-shirt or badge provided you base it in claims to oppression. You can even wear it to the universal imaginary cocktail party of people whose approach to social life is to seek to be comforted in the reassurance that God is happy and good his world. (The fundamental rule would be to never want to say anything controversial. People will be offended by disagreement, insulted by criticism.)

In asking, as I so often find myself doing, how a film about any aspect of life anywhere is “political,” I sometimes find myself thinking about what this can be in terms of what it is not. The rest of this paragraph digresses accordingly, as I think the difference is instructive; and I find it helps me in thinking about why in recent decades we have seen such a rise in a slow cinema that often portrays ugliness and squalor but is also immersive, and uses a saturated hyper-realism that tends to move away from narrative even in films that do tell stories. This means moving away from an event-driven cinema of epiphany (e.g., early Rossellini and Fellini) towards one whose temporality seems irremediably flat. (And not necessarily by broadening the eventfully revelatory, as in Malick.) The horror film teaches us merely to not be naive; its lesson that everyone can suffer anything is the complementary term to the discovery, in films that are more ones of terror (Hitchcock and others) that, as Polish emigré director and Holocaust and Manson Family killings survivor Roman Polanski has the tyrant and villain primal father Noah Cross say at the end of “Chinatown,” anyone can do anything, and that of course is frightening. There is a film of terror that is always political, and is not fundamentally about conspiracy because it is not about persons or events, and may be indifferent to causes. The scandal of a Costa-Gavras or an Oliver Stone is that these inverted crime stories are supposed to reveal the thinking that defines the disenchanted radical left, or an idea thereof; for some reason, this mood was very prominent in Hollywood cinema in the early 1970s. Of course, Communist Eastern Europe differed from America in that here malefactions of government are often revealed only in and reduced to scandals of powerful individuals ad scofflaw criminals, so we can still enjoy seeing someone show the emperor to be naked; the Eastern Europeans were rarely in doubt on this point. There dissident cinema did not show that state oppression existed, but was more likely to rather explore how it can be understood, lived with, or, sometimes, struggled against. With our historical isolation and naivety, we enjoy the privilege of being able to become scandalized and so disillusioned; there the idealism of official discourse and the cynicism of everyday life and official institutions both went hand in hand, as the question for so many people was not whether the system was bad but only whether it could be reformed. In some of the films of John Frankenheimer, Alan Pakula, or early Polanski (whose career began in 1950s Poland), paranoia is not “demonstrated" (to be right) but treated as a problem. There is a hint of this in racial terms in the recent black comedy “Get Out,” which is not about the scandal that white people really want to kill black people, so much as the scandal that black people are led or invited to think that, and it might even make sense to; but then, this is what psychological theories get wrong about paranoia: that the real problem in some sense is in its subject persons and the way they see and read things, not its objects, is itself the most powerful social criticism. The deep truth of paranoia is that the paranoiac is all too right: his very suspicion and the actions it necessitates are what lead him unwittingly into collusion with it (as in Pakula’s “The Parallax View,” a film whose title suggests what may be needed: to look awry, from an unexpected angle at what is normally visible is not the same as to look “behind” the appearances for what they conceal (as a “plot”: paranoid theories are always narratival and posit a strongly authorizing author of events), or, more brilliantly, Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby,” where the ridiculous witch plot placed in Hollywood among actors, no less, a bit more than a decade after the anti-Communist witch hunts, finally draws in the panicked young wife, whose very maternal interest driving her anxiety must lead her to want to care for the baby, even if his father is Satan and his eyes monstrous and so unseeing. They’ll get you in the end, just as you feared, by using your fears to manufacture a compliance: the real message of paranoia is that “they” will fuck with you, especially by provoking you to think they are. The paranoiac figures it all out, as he is sure that “something is going on” (and only “what’s puzzling you is the nature of my game,” as the Rolling Stones put it in “Sympathy for the Devil”): like an investigative journalist, he wants a story, just as a detective wants an agent with a motive, cause of the crime. We want to know, to have it explained; as if we need to know that the story is real or the reality a story with a conclusion that explains the events that preceded it. The paranoiac figures it out, but the truth may be more “obvious” since it needs not to be deciphered or “read” but only seen. Also, a narrativally paranoid way of seeing things politically will address an idea of “evil,” while a more contemplatively hyper-realist cinema that dares to soak the viewer in boredom and ugliness might seem somehow both before and beyond good and evil, pointing to some ethics of being and seeing (identified, of course, the point that was spectacularly announced in Antonioni’s 1964 “Red Desert”) that is both more sober and difficult and somehow more true and truer to cinema as an art form and its most proper capabilities, which requires time as duration and movement but not necessarily event, change, discovery, story. Heideggerians might say a “dwelling” that is closer in fact to what “thinking” is or should be. .

For the world of Communist Roumania in “4 Months” is less about events than atmosphere, about a form of life. If this atmosphere is setting considered as problem, characters, author, or viewer might contemplate solutions: what is to be done? Lenin’s question, indeed! Is that the political question? Didn’t Marx get it backwards? People have been changing the world and accomplishing lots of things, but narrative art at least wants most centrally to understand it. As if seeing, understanding, and thinking could have important consequences. Christian Petzold, a German director who grew up in East Germany, offers an answer in “Barbara.” There the answer is not a happy one: Barbara stays rather than escaping, in her doctor job, under the intrusive eyes of state thugs, and instead helps a rebellious and possibly not very smart young woman, despite or because of her poorer prospects and more difficult circumstances, to take the boat out, shove off, and leave, which is perhaps not much, but something.

But solutions to problems are elements of stories, even if they would save or rescue the story from its original direction. Maxim for filmmakers: Don’t tell a story, show a world.

After all, that’s where the problems reside. Corollary maxim: Using an art work that fascinates or troubles you somehow, look at a world, and find its problem, or problematic: how it can be understood, how we can think about it.