4, 3, 2 ... finally!

At long last I've watched the much-talked about Romanian film, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days. By all accounts it should have been an Oscar nominee and furthermore I could not FIND a single bad review of it earlier this year as I read about it everywhere, and I tried to go see it at Lincoln Plaza but it was sold out and then I kept trying to go and it just somehow never worked out...but that's been remedied now.

In a nutshell (how we love those) it's a bleak portrayal of how a young woman helps her college roommate procure an illegal abortion in late 1980s communist Romania. I'd heard "gripping," "unflinching" and so on. True, true. I think the best thing about it -- no wait, the two best things about it -- were 1. that it provided dramatic (variously tension-raising, frustrating, infuriating) plot points without lots of big flashing for-lack-of-a-better-word-blockbuster bells and whistles to let you know a dramatic point had been reached, and that kind of made you as a viewer suck in your breath all the more when they happened and 2. that the focus on the friend, and the fall-out on her relationships, makes you consider the intense ramifications of all that happened quite differently than in just focusing on the girl who gets the abortion.

Oh, who am I kidding -- as if there were just two magnificent things about it! And by the way, what you learn about living in that particular regime in the late 80s along makes it worth watching too.

Do yourselves a favor. Really. (Oooh, and you can Netflix, as I did.