4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days

Abortion lends itself well to drama, almost too well in fact. A subject that arouses strong emotions on both sides of the polemic is ripe for overwrought dramatisation. Too often the result is disappointing, more the stuff of a TV movie than cinema. Cristian Mungiu's Palme d'Or-winning 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days is a more sober-minded approach to the topic, and, at the risk of making a grotesquely disproportionate analogy, it is more powerful than your average abortion film just as Primo Levi's writings on Auschwitz, composed in the cold light of his own experiences are more jarring than many a commercialised emotional Holocaust book or movie that has appeared since.

Mungiu, born in 1968, is one of that generation of Romanians known as the decretei - the children of the decree - the decree being that of Nicolae Ceauşescu in 1966, forbidding abortion and enjoining on all Romanian women to reproduce as a patriotic gesture. The dictator's words 'the fetus is the property of the entire society; anyone who avoids having children is a deserter who abandons the laws of national continuity' dwarf even the worst attempts of Western moralists to exert control over women's bodies. Ceauşescu's abortion ban was part of a drive to increase the populaton of the country by 50% by the end of the century and though it didn't quite succeed, it did produce a generation of sufficiently rebellious youngsters that, like Mungiu, were approaching adulthood in 1989 and toppled the regime that caused them to 'be too many'. Such is the theory put forward by Steven Leavitt in Freakonomics, a not-entirely-persuasive one, but one which does have a good deal of logic to it. Mungiu, in an interview with Libération last week, stated that the moral debate over abortion that exists in the West was never applicable in Romania. People arranged clandestine abortions simply out of necessity and, as he says, partly out of defiance to the regime. It is this relatively simpler context that gives his film more air to breath and greater room for dramatic manoeuvre. It also helps that Mungiu, one of the new wave of hugely impressive Romanian directors, is a masterly technician who also knows how to manage actors perfectly.

The film takes place in a provincial city in Romania in 1987, and it charts the efforts of a young student Gabita to terminate her pregnancy, with the almost-single-handed help of her immensely resourceful friend Ottilia. A dodgy, yet consummately professional, illegal abortionist - superbly played by Vlad Ivanov - is engaged but Gabita's panicked modification of the truth causes problems that have disastrous effects. The film is beautifully shot, alternating between long virtuoso handheld sequences that remind one of the Dardenne brothers' Rosetta and even longer one-take static scenes that forensically observe both the abortion process and the girls' efforts to avoid detection. The lighting is despairingly gloopy, all grey and green tones, and it seemed even bleaker on second viewing, which makes further demands on the viewer. But the performances of all the cast, particularly the afore-mentioned Ivanov and Anamaria Marinca as Otilia, line the film with a surprising amount of humanity that leavens the task somewhat. Mungiu also leaves many things hanging in the film - for instance we are never told why Gabita has left it so late to have an abortion, and it is never exactly clear what the exchange that leads to the central tragic sacrifice articulates - and this once again gives the film a wider resonance than the average issue-of-the-week movie. There are of course many nuances that will only be familiar, I imagine, to Romanian audiences, many of which are delivered by the older generation at a birthday dinner for Otilia's boyfriend's mother. This scene is brilliantly shot in claustrophobic close-up and is the stuff of great drama; it is not even without some biting humour, such as a doctor and probably Party member (played by the ubiquitous Ion Sapdaru) who lashes out at the spoiled, ungrateful young.

4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days is the fourth Cannes prizewinner to come out of Romania in the past three years and though the films have not been commercial successes back home (this one has yet to be released there in fact) their international profile has ensured that the directors Mungiu, Cristi Puiu, Corneliu Porumboiu and Catalin Mitulescu, and others to come, will be able to continue making films. Quite why there is this sudden proliferation of great films from the country is unclear though there is really no reason why a country like Romania with a strong and celebrated artistic heritage and a pained history to accompany it should be short of the raw material to make great films. Some might argue that Mungiu's film is not as great as Puiu's The Death of Mr Lazarescu but it looks likely, in my eyes at least, to emulate it as film of the year.

California Dreamin'

Cinemagoers in Paris are, by some stretch, the most privileged in the world. With some three hundred films, spread among new and repertory stuff, the city possesses a cinema culture that few other cities can match. It's the main reason I first made my way here, in my mid twenties, when I was considerably more impassioned about cinema than I am now (some people might find that hard to believe but I watched way more movies back then). One great privilege we get is the opportunity to watch, the week after the Cannes film festival, the films selected in both the Un Certain regard sidebar and the Director's Fortnight. Work commitments have prevented me from seeing as many films as I would like, such as Lenny Abrahamson's Garage, which is screening tomorrow evening, and Roy Andersson's You, the Living. But I did manage to get to see the eagerly anticipated California Dreamin', the other Romanian success story of the festival, winning the 'non-competitive' Un Certain regard prize.

The film is the first and only feature directed by the late Cristian Nemescu, who died in a car crash at the age of 27 in Bucharest last year. The film has been preserved as it was at the time of his death, which unsurprisingly means it is structurally uneven and a bit too long. I will probably be accused of being cynical in thinking that the award was given mainly as a sympathy award to recognise posthumously a talent that may have blossomed into one of Europe's greatest filmmakers. To be completely frank, it is hard to believe that it was the best film on show in the sidebar, though this is not to say it is not an impressive debut feature.

The film treats of the visit of a platoon of US marines stranded in a small Romanian village en route to Kosovo in 1999; they are unable to move on due to a corrupt station master, who also appears to have the entire village under his thumb, refusing to allow them to pass without the appropriate customs papers, even though the Romanian government has give the green light. The marines end up staying for five days and the younger soldiers fraternise with the local women, are feted by the shambolic but genial mayor (played by the wonderful comic actor Ion Sapduru, who was brilliant as the alcoholic academic in 12:08 East of Bucharest) while their captain, Jones, played by a gracefully ageing Armand Assante drives himself almost insane trying to force a way out of the impasse.

There are nods to both Robert Altman and Emir Kusturica in Nemescu's broad picaresque canvas, and if the film is occasionally unconvincing in some of the situations (particularly the final fifteen minutes), his ambition is matched by his ability to render memorable characters, over whom the shadow of history looms. The obstructionist stationmaster Doiaru, played by Razvan Vasilescu is a man embittered by both the deportation of his capitalist parents by the Soviets after the second world war and what he sees as the betrayal of his country by the Americans in the carve-up of Europe that followed. A film where the American military are portrayed in such a sympathetic - even strangely gentle - light could only come from post-Communist Eastern Europe though it is a bit surprising that Doiaru should be the only dissenting voice. I don't know what the sentiments of ordinary Romanians would have been during the NATO bombardments of Yugoslavia but I can imagine that there would have been some sympathy at least felt for their neighbours, if not for its government.

As I said above there are a number of structural problems with the film but the intention of the producers to leave it as Nemescu had until then fashioned it is a respectful one. Though the film is no masterpiece, it is hugely enjoyable and certain sequences - such as the opening scenes of a World War II Allied bombardment - are virtuosic enough to suggest that Nemescu might in time have become a great filmmaker. His tragic death robbed a country with an impressively renascent national cinema of another great talent.

Cannes Do

I had planned to post on the Cannes Film Festival earlier on but an overloaded hard-drive took its toll on the speed at which I was able to type what was turning out to be a lengthy post. Having cleared up a huge amount of space by getting rid of back-ups that I already had elsewhere, I'm back on the case. However by now the results are known. A film that had been tipped by many to win took the Palme d'Or, it was 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Cristian Mungiu's bleak drama about backstreet abortions in Ceaucescu's Romania. After the honours bestowed on Cristi Puiu and Corneliu Porumboiu, this is the third year in a row that Romanian films have taken a major Cannes prize. Considering that the country's cinema was scarcely known in Western Europe until a couple of years ago and also considering the relative poverty of the country, this development is nothing short of amazing. It is a film I look forward to seeing when it gets released here.

Painter-cum-filmmaker Julian Schnabel took the Best Director prize for his moving adaptation of Jean-Dominique Bauby's memoir Le Scaphandre et le papillon, which I saw on Friday night. And Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's Persepolis, which I have written about on a number of occasions on this blog, shared the Jury Prize with Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light. Here's a taster of the film, which is being released over here next month. It's in French but it's going to be released in an English-language version too. Looks good. And it pisses off the fools running the Islamic Republic too. More on Cannes tomorrow.

Climates, Clandestini and Revolutions

There are few film directors that would cast themselves as a rapist in a film, much less resist making the character an out-and-out villain. The Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, in his latest film Climates, has done just that and what is most disturbing about his character's rape of a female friend is the fact that the woman calls him again and seems to be on good terms with him. Distasteful and morally dubious as this is, it is nonetheless credible, as viewed within the film's narrative. Ceylan's character, a lecturer in architecture, is an untrustworthy, supercilious sort, who lies to his estranged wife in a vain attempt to win her back, only to change his mind again. But, every villain has their reasons, as Jean Renoir once said, and even this unpleasant man's quotidian life, so impressively delineated, is compulsively watchable. The penultimate scene where he lies to his wife and reduces her to tears is both uncomfortable and familiar to anyone who has gone through a painful break-up. There is also a dream-sequence where the younger wife, Bahar - played by the director's real-life wife Ebru - imagines she is being buried in sand by her husband. It is one of the few I have ever seen in a film that is in any way persuasive.

After his previous film, Uzak, which was an arthouse hit a couple of years ago, Ceylan proves himself to be one of cinema's finest chroniclers of human emotions. In Uzak, a depressive Istanbul photographer puts up his country cousin and the relation between them quickly becomes strained. There is a similar air of pessimism in Climates, though one shot through with a beautiful visual texture - Ceylan is also an accomplished photographer - and the performances, though quiet and intimiste, are far from the catatonically mannered ones so familiar from countless arthouse releases. Marital difficulties make up a significant sub-genre of cinema, with classics such as Rossellini's Voyage to Italy, Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage and Antonioni's La Notte and Red Desert. The Japanese director Nobuhiro Suwa, who is also a fine observer of strained relationships disappointed last year with Un Couple parfait, his first French film, which was a bit too talky for my liking. Until his next film, Climates is a more than adequate surrogate, one that confirms Ceylan as one of Europe's most redoubtable filmmakers.

There were two other decent European films I saw last week. One, Italian, entitled Saimir, directed by Francesco Munzi, about an Albanian expat teenager, who lives with his people-trafficking father and who weathers a number of cruel blows before taking things, rather foolishly into his own hands, and extracting a certain justice. It is a tough film that reminds one of the Dardenne brothers' work, La Promesse, though it has a more stately style and it lacks the Dardenne's Hardyesque eye for a crucial event that sets in train an irrevocable, tragic sequence of events. A bit jilted in parts, it is nonetheless an assured film.

The other film is 12:08, East of Bucharest, a political comedy about a local TV station's attempts to mount a televised inquest on the fifteenth anniversary of Ceaucescu's fall into whether the local town actually witnessed a revolution, meaning, did people actually protest before 12:08 on the 22nd of December 1989, at which time the dictator abdicated and dissent became safe once again? The film is a bit lopsided as the second half devotes a bit too much time to the programme itself and the central conceit of erroneously-claimed heroism is a bit jaded, having been used to claim allegiance to everything from the French resistance to participation in the Easter Rising. But there is some sharply mordant humour in the film, particularly in the depictions of the pompous textile-manufacturer-turned-TV-station-owner and the haplessly indebted alcoholic academic, who claims to have been at the fore of the local revolution all those years before. The film won the Caméra d'Or last year for its young director Corneliu Porumboiu, just thirty-one years of age, and he uses his experience as a camera operator on such a local television station for much of the humour. And there is a subtle lyricism in his direction also, such as the two montages of the streetlights turning first off and then on that bookend the film, and which also serve as a metaphor for the hesitant revolution of the town's history. Though, like the superior The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, the film does not make one terribly keen to visit Romania, it is further evidence of a remarkable cinematic renaissance in the beleagured country. Porumboiu is a director to watch out for in the future.

Underachievement Films of the Year

A bit late on this one; it was one of those posts that I had intended doing over the Christmas but I was stymied by the parlous state of Irish telecommunications and the parsimony of wi-fi suppliers in Dublin. But here it is late, and the lateness was a boon of some sort as I managed to see Paul Verhoeven's Black Book, his best film in years and a worthy entry in the top 1o. The year overall was not bad, though much of the better stuff I saw was from Europe and Asia. Big disappointments came in the shape of Terrence Malick's The New World, which was a brooding, navel-gazing piece of fluff and Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley, which, despite winning the Palme d'Or and doing great box-office in Ireland and France, was too much a dull retread of Land and Freedom for my tastes. Martin Scorsese, according to the critics, steamrolled back to form with The Departed; more discerning viewers have found it to be preposterously overrated but, no doubt a shoo-in for the Oscars. I have yet to see some of the year's more interesting films, such as Richard Linklater's brace of A Scanner Darkly and Fast Food Nation, Christopher Nolan's The Prestige and Alphonso Cuaron's Children of Men. I look forward to seeing them soon. And there's Pan's Labyrinth too, though given my previous dislike of Guillermo del Toro's work I don't expect to be too bowled over. But then again, I thought the same of del Toro's compatriot Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu until I was pleasantly surprised by his brilliantly-mounted Babel. There were bad films along the way, quite a few (though I managed to avoid most of the more obviously bad ones), hang your heads in shame Lord of War, Transamerica, Walk the Line and, above all, Marie Antoinette, the year's biggest royal mess, in itself the greatest argument furnished in favour of the French revolution these past few years.

Anyway here goes, starting at 10.

10. Video for 'Here It Goes Again' (OK Go/Trish Sie)

It might seem a bit unorthodox to have a film that is just over three minutes long, and which has never been near a cinema in here but the by now celebrated choreographed video, shot in one take of the band strutting their stuff on eight treadmills is pure cinematic genius, throwaway and painstakingly crafted at the same time. It is also possessed of more wit and visual panache than the vast majority of theatrical releases anywhere in the world last year. It's even hard to begrudge the band the exposure they have generated for their so-so Indie rock. Charming stuff.

9. Oxhide (Jiayin Liu)

I don't expect that many people will rush out to watch this, a two-hour docudrama shot on low-resolution DV, entirely in a tanner's workshop in Beijing, in long static takes, using the director's family (including herself) as cast. It looks gloopy green and the camera never moves once but it is completely entrancing. The director Liu is only 25 and she did practically everything on this film in an astounding piece of DIY filmmaking; as ever with prodigies of the sort, it has an incredible maturity and the performances she draws out of her cranky family's quotidian life are marvellous. Despite the best efforts of the Chinese government to marshall cinematic output there is still good stuff being made and the freshness of the work never lets up.

8. Capote (Bennett Miller)

Biopics out of Hollywood are usually godawful, full of pious platitudes about journeys through harrowing adversity and the horrors overcome by people with the right can-do spirit. Bennett Miller's portrayal of Truman Capote's descent into terminal depression while writing In Cold Blood is a marvel however, beautifully shot and edited, perfectly scripted and a fine performance, just on the right side of mannered, by one of the finest American actors alive, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who deservedly picked up an Oscar for this. Mercifully a literary film that is neither vulgarly inane nor tweedy.

7. Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (Douglas Gordon & Philippe Parrano)

The prospect of a documentary filmed in real-time on one of the greatest footballers ever by two video artists renowned for their endurance-testing installations was not instantly appealing and, when I saw this in Paris just before the World Cup, half the audience walked out, probably a mix of arty types and football fans expecting something different. But Gordon and Parrano's film of Zidane playing for Real Madrid in a 2-1 win over Villareal in April 2005 is riveting stuff for the insight it gives both into the work of a modern footballer and the movements of the human anatomy. Sixteen cameras were trained on Zidane for the duration of the game, and the result is intriguing and boring in turns but one of the few great art/film crossovers. Zidane's surprisingly gnomic pronouncements about the game are interlaced with a soundtrack by Mogwai, and there is even drama, prophetic of the great man's eventual exit from the game: he gets sent off in the last minute after a mass brawl.

6. Black Book (Paul Verhoeven)

After years of making brash thrillers in Hollywood that were always too clever for their own good and built of ambitions far exceeding their execution, Verhoeven returned to his native Holland where he made some of his greatest films in the seventies and early eighties. Black Book is a virtuoso old-fashioned thriller, set during the Nazi occupation of Holland and based on a true story, about a young Jewish woman named Rachael Stein who joins the Resistance in The Hague and goes undercover to seduce the local SS Captain. The film is a masterpiece of detail - cosmetic, historical and political - and it has a splendid twist about half and hour from the end that nobody will see coming. Best of all though, it is a refreshingly unsentimental and clear-headed drama about both the Holocaust and the local Resistance to Nazism.

5. Close to Home (Vardit Bilu & Dalia Hagar)

Two Israeli girls doing their national service patrolling West Jerusalem, hassling Arabs at random, and doing their utmost to shirk their duties, all the while maintaining a breezy indifference to the war on their doorstep. A cool examination of the demeaning nature of Israeli checkpoints that also manages to be funny and touchingly human. The latest in a line of great Israeli films.

4. Guernsey (Nanouk Leopold)

Another Dutch film, this time about a young mother who witnesses the suicide of a colleague while working as an engineer in Egypt and then tells nobody about it, allowing her marriage and her relationship with her widowed father and her desperately embittered sister unravel almost as an existential experiment. Leopold touches all the right buttons in the Antonioni fashion but her film has a bracing individuality and an almost-Protestant rigidity of economy in its editing and mise en scène. There is not a shot wasted and as well as featuring a great, haunting performance as the wife by Maria Kraakman, it has a cast of some of the finest buildings seen on film in many a year.

3. To Get to Heaven First You Have to Die (Jamshed Usmonov)

The world is not overrun with films from Tajikistan but Jamshed Usmonov has managed to carve out an international reputation with his understated, grimly comic cinema. Here he follows up the acclaimed The Angel on the Right with the tale of a teenage husband unable to consummate his marriage but, who, it appears is not any the less horny for all that. He takes a trip to the capital Dushanbe, tries his hand at following the city women around, with little success only to fall in with a small-time hood, who inveigles him into a dodgy heist. The film is one gripping episode after another, all imbued with a wonderful dramatic ambiguity, bestowed as much by the passivity of the actors as by Usmonov's clockwork-precise direction. And, like all the films in this list, brilliantly paced.

2. Requiem (Hans-Christian Schmid)

Hans-Christian Schmid's harrowing account of the exorcism of a young German woman in the 1970s is both a masterful piece of kinetic cinema and an angry, if even-handed examination of faith and madness. The young woman, played by the amazing Sandra Hüller, is doomed from the start, as her epilepsy cuts her off from society and hampers her studies and her efforts to live an ordinary life. Her obsession with Catherine of Siena does not help, leading her to believe her illness is a messianic affliction thrust upon her by God. A perfect counterpart to Breaking the Waves and arguably more moving, Requiem is proof of the current rude health of German cinema.

1. The Death of Mr Lazarescu (Christu Puiu)

I don't know what has suddenly got into Romanian cinema but all of a sudden it is a hot ticket internationally, after years of obscurity. This year there was Catalin Mitulescu's How I Celebrated the End of the World about the fall of Ceaucescu, and there is the forthcoming 12:08 East 0f Bucharest by Corneliu Porumboiu, winner of the Caméra d'Or at Cannes last year. The previous year at Cannes Christu Puiu took the Un Certain Regard sidebar award for this brilliant comic drama about an ailing sexagenarian alcoholic's passage from one Bucharest hospital to another one autumn night. The self-confessed hypochondriac Puiu used his experiences in the city's hospitals to create this drama in which the splendidly-named Dante Lazarescu undergoes a nightmarish journey, entirely beyond his control as he lies semi-conscious on a stretcher, aided only by a sympathetic brow-beaten female paramedic. The state of the Romanian health service is abysmal and Lazarescu is successively misdiagnosed, rediagnosed and at one point turned away by a megalomaniacal doctor intent on punishing him for his drinking. Mr Lazarescu is redolent of the 'little man' in many a Central European novel and even while prostrate for much of the film he is a beguiling presence. The final, protracted scene where his dead body is washed and dressed is almost unbearably moving. Puiu intends this to be the first of a sequence of six films, inspired by Éric Rohmer's Moral Tales; somebody ought to keep the chequebook open indefinitely for him if this stunning film is anything to go by.


Seanachie also liked:

• Odete (João Pedro Rodrigues)
• Flandres (Bruno Dumont)
• Indigènes (Rachid Bouchareb)
• Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako)
• Munich (Steven Spielberg)
• Dans Paris (Christophe Honoré)
• The Sun (Aleksandr Sokurov)
• A Cock and Bull Story (Michael Winterbottom)
• A Prairie Home Companion (Robert Altman)
• Sangre (Amat Escalante)
• L'Ivresse du pouvoir (Claude Chabrol)
• Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee)
• Shortbus (John Cameron Mitchell)
• Lights in the Dusk (Aki Kaurismäki)
• Shanghai Dreams (Xiaoshuai Wang)
• Babel (Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu)
• Pavee Lackeen (Perry Ogden)
• Offside (Jafar Panahi)
• Lucy (Henning Winckler)
• La Pressentiment (Jean-Pierre Darroussin)
• Libero (Kim Rossi-Stuart)
• Volver (Pedro Almodóvar)
  
• Pork and Milk (Valérie Mréjen)
• Taxidermy (György Palfi)
• Good Night and Good Luck (George Clooney)
• How I Celebrated the End of the World (Catalin Mitulescu)