From minimalist representation to excessive interpretation: Contextualizing 4 Months,3 Weeks and 2 Days

Abstract

This article examines the Romanian and American reception of Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007), arguing that the film’s representational minimalism indirectly caused an excess of interpretation across cultural contexts. This over-interpretation was possible because the film’s aesthetic minimalism encouraged viewers to decode the story through the lens of their own cultural and political predispositions. The historical and social background against which American viewers consumed this story of an illegal abortion during communism shaped its meaning (and perceptions about its political relevance), plugging an art-house Romanian film into the larger national debate over reproductive rights in the contemporary United States. Thus, in its transition from the domestic to the global marketplace, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days was transformed from an act of amoral probing of Romanian individual and collective memory about communism, into a film about the controversial nature of particular individual choices within the liberal capitalist paradigm.