No abstract

In one of his earlier films, Occident (2002), Cristian Mungiu showcases the East–West divide in post-communist Romania. First, the rhetoric of leaving and the rhetoric of staying are complex historical legacies of the communist period, when communist propaganda demonized capitalism and the West. In the communist totalitarian public rhetoric, East–West binaries emphasized the East and communism, which led to a fetishization of the West in the private sphere. I call the motility of predominant discourses between private and public spheres the dialectic of rhetoric, which is also always historical. Secondly, the fetish of the West is a kind of Occidentalism, or a reversed Orientalism, and it is made apparent in the film’s title. The film’s characters are trapped between binaries, given that all these factors have social, political and psychological consequences on people’s lives. Compositionally, the film’s multiple narrative planes compile a postmodern, fragmented structure, mirroring the breakdown of rhetorical master-narratives in post-communism.

Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days ( 4, 3, 2 for short) is a classic of the new wave in Romanian cinema. Centred on the paternalistic and patriarchal relationship between political power and women, this analysis reveals the psychological effects of traumatic situations and how unconscious (hidden, often irrational) drives determine human behaviour in subjects living under totalitarianism. This article provides a reading of the film through such concepts as the (male) gaze, the law in relation to the figure of the father and the Lacanian orders of the symbolic and the real, the split personality of the abused woman as both subject and object, and life/death instincts in the face of totalitarian intrusion into the reproductive rights of women. This kind of analysis sheds new light on the nuances of the film and the significance of the silence in it by exposing the symbolic reality of communist totalitarianism as opposed to a seemingly authentic Lacanian real that is hidden in the silence and in the materiality of the female body.