(2007)
For my money, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days contains the single most powerful shot of this decade. I've written about the image before. About halfway into the film, director Cristian Mungiu has mounted enough visceral dread to rattle even the most jaded viewers of Euro art-house cinema. We've watched his protagonist, Otilia, sacrifice her body and sanity. We've witnessed the queasy minutiae of an illegal abortion in 1980s Romania. And, just as tensions have peaked, we see Otilia abandon an ailing friend to have dinner with her boyfriend's chattering family.
So Mungiu treats us to a five-minute take of the above image. Five minutes of Otilia's blank stare, as the surrounding elders trade inanities. Five minutes of a woman who must sit still, despite her body's cries to shiver, scream, and run out the door.
I love this scene, and the film as a whole, for how it weaves the personal and the political. Consider all the reasons Otilia must sit at that dinner table -- the gender and generational politics that force a young woman to sit quietly while her friend whimpers across town from a slipshod abortion. The film offers no easy antidotes to patriarchy or totalitarianism. Instead, through one harrowing case study, it shows us just how terrifying the invisible sociopolitical norms of a specific time and place can be.
(p.s. I can testify, through experience, that 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is one of the worst date movies of all time).
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