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.
BerdahlD (1999) Ostalgie for the present: memory, longing, and East German things. Ethnos64(2): 192–211.
6.
BerdahlD (2010) Good Bye, Lenin! Aufwiedersehen GDR: on the social life of socialism. In: TodorovaMGilleZ (eds) Post-Communist Nostalgia. New York: Berghahn, pp. 177–89.
BoyerD (2006) Ostalgie and the politics of the future in Eastern Germany. Public Culture18(2): 361–81.
12.
BoyerD (2010) From algos to autonomos: nostalgic Eastern Europe as postimperial mania. In: TodorovaMGilleZ (eds) Post-Communist Nostalgia. Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 17–28.
13.
BoymS (2002) The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books.
DavidHP (1992) Abortion in Europe, 1920–91: a public health perspective. Studies in Family Planning, 23(1): 12–15.
24.
De IralaJOsorioALopez del BurgoSCC (2011) Choice of birth control methods among European women and the role of partners and providers. Contraception84(6): 558–64.
Godeanu-KenworthyO (2011) Deconstructing ostalgia: the national past between commodity and simulacrum in Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye Lenin! (2003). Journal of European Studies41(2): 161–77.
SedghGHenshawSSinghSBankoleADrescherJ (2007) Legal abortion worldwide: incidence and recent trends. International Family Planning Perspectives33(3): 106–16.
59.
ŞerbanAL (2010) Romanian cinema: from modernity to neorealism. Film Criticism34(2–3): 2–21.
StaabA (1998) National Identity in Eastern Germany: Inner Unification or Continued Separation?Westport, CT: Praeger.
64.
TismăneanuV (2008) Democracy and memory: Romania confronts its communist past. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science617: 166–80.
65.
TodorovaM (2010) The process of remembering communism. In: TodorovaM (ed.) Remembering Communism: Genres of Representation. New York: Social Science Research Council, pp. 9–35.
66.
VerderyK (1996). What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next?Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
67.
WilsonE (2008) 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days: An ‘abortion movie’?Film Quarterly61(4): 18–23.
68.
WoodK (2012) Žižek: A Reader’s Guide. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
69.
YampolskiM (1994) Cinema without cinema. In: BrashinskyMHortonA (eds) Russian Critics on the Cinema of Glasnost. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
70.
ZielinskaA (2010) State power and the body: the (anti-)abortion legacies of communist Romania and postcommunist Poland in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Nothing. In: HanákováPJohnsonKB (eds) Visegrad Cinema: Points of Contact from the New Waves to the Present. Prague: Casablanca Publishing, pp. 173–81.
71.
ŽižekS (1997) The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso.
72.
ŽižekS (1999) The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso.
