Desperately seeking an abortion

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, winner of the grand prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, is set in Communist Romania, in the 1980s, with boxy Eastern Bloc autos, ill-lit streets, and a thriving black market: Kent cigarettes, Tic-Tacs, abortions.

Like various forms of contraception, abortion was illegal under the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu - totalitarian measures to boost the country's population. And so, in the haunting 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a pregnant college student and her dorm-mate arrange for an illegal termination - to be performed in a drab hotel, by a guy carrying his devices, and his rubber gloves, in a cheap attache case.

Set over the course of one harrowing 24-hour period and featuring an astounding performance by Anamaria Marinca as the young woman who abets her pregnant friend, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is a grim and powerful study of desperation and defiance. The film shows how the soul-crushing laws of a paranoid government can trap its people in a waking nightmare.

But 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, written and directed by Cristian Mungiu and shot in long, slow takes, is not so much a political film as a personal one: It examines, with exacting detail, the fierce resilience of its main character, Marinca's Otilia, and the lengths she must go to aid her confused, passively manipulative friend, Gabita (Laura Vasiliu).

A sense of certain doom pervades Mungiu's story, but it's to his credit that the director never stoops to cheap melodrama. Returning to the hotel from an obligatory dinner at her boyfriend's family's apartment, Otilia walks down dark, gloomy side streets late at night, a figure following ominously behind her. But no terrible fate awaits Otilia - she makes it back to the room, and there finds something more chilling, and more real, than any movie mugger.

Watching 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days isn't exactly an enjoyable experience, but the absolute clarity of the storytelling, the aching authenticity of the performances, make for a film that will stay with you for at least as long as the period alluded to in its title.

It might stay with you forever.

Directed by Cristian Mungiu. With Anamaria Marinca, Laura Vasiliu and Vlad Ivanov. Distributed by IFC First Take. In Romanian with subtitles.

Running time: 1 hour, 53 mins.

Parent's guide: No MPAA rating (sexual violence, nudity, profanity, adult themes)

Playing at: Ritz at the BourseEndText