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Dir: Cristian Mungiu.
Cast: Anamaria Marinca, Laura Vasiliu, Vlad Ivanov
Description: Otilia and Gabita share at dormitory at college where they are both students under the Ceausescu regime in mid-'80s Romania. While Otilia sources supplies including soap and cigarettes from her boyfriend Adi, Gabita nervously prepares for her illegal abortion, to be performed by the bullying Mr Bebe. When it transpires that Gabita is further along in her pregnancy than first intimated, Bebe exacts a terrible price to continue with the procedure, forcing the two young women to make sickening choices.
Country: ROM. 2007. 113mins
Baby talk: Gabita (Laura Vasiliu, second left) and Otilia (Anamaria Marinca, third left)
Who would have thought that a small Romanian film, completed for around £200,000, would not only win the Palme d'Or at Cannes but also the International Critics Award as the best film of the year? But Cristian Mungiu's brilliant little tale about a student trying to procure an abortion in the last years of the Communist regime deserves the praise that has been heaped upon it.
It could hardly be better told, reminding us in its observant precision of the great Kieslowski's Decalogue. It is the first film of a larger project called Tales from the Golden Age, which intends to be a subjective history of ordinary people's lives during Ceaucescu's regime.
Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) and Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) share a room in the student hostel of a small town. Gabita is pregnant and hopeless at organising an illegal abortion properly. Otilia has to do it all. She rents a room in a cheap hotel and sends for Mr Bebe (Vlad Ivanov).
He has done abortions before and, irritated by their innocence both of the procedure and the risks, sets his terms high. He wants the money they have collected, but it is not enough. He also wants Otilia. She gives herself to him to save her friend and the abortion is carried out.
We see nothing of the sex and little of the abortion. But we do see Otilia cleaning herself in the shower and forcing herself to keep her promise to her boyfriend to go to a party for his mother.
She is disgusted with herself and short with the boyfriend. As she sits at the happy, talkative dinner table, trying to find an excuse to leave and find out what has happened to Gabita, everything that has happened, and might now happen, is written across her face.
Marinca gives a wonderful performance as Otilia, telling us precisely what she has sacrificed trying to aid her friend. If her face is familiar, by the way, it is because she was in David Yates's Sex Traffic and Coppola's Youth Without Youth.
Mungiu's direction looks plain but is, in fact, as precise and well-judged as it is possible to be. He deftly sketches Romanian life under Communism without recourse to polemic or over-emphasis.
The greyness of life in this small provincial town and the bleak rudeness of the hotel staff are evident. The film looks totally real, almost like a documentary, from beginning to end. But the artifice is there in spades.
This is indeed one of the best films of the year, part of a remarkable batch of work from the Romanian cinema, and a potent reminder of what can be done even in the most straitened and unpromising of circumstances.
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