A Film Canon

Less a critique than a holograph of bureaucracy, this astonishing film deflects narrative into procedure, elaborating all the bureaucratic barriers to getting an illegal abortion in Communist Romania. On the one hand, Mungiu identifies his camera with the bureaucracy it describes, favoring long takes that deflect seeing into looking, and linger on faces until they simply become part of the bureaucratic architecture that's literally and hauntingly elaborated in the final scene. Similarly, he transforms every discussion or utterance into so many reiterations of numbers, logistics and quantifications, ensuring that the two students who are seeking the abortion (Anamaria Marinca and Laura Visiliu) are never given any conventional psychological depth. On the other hand, there's a mild, hand-held tremble to the cinematography, and a mildly improvised quality to the dialogue, that suggests the possibility, or at least the fantasy, of some kind of spontaneous exemption to bureaucracy, just as the abortion is anticipated as a space where bureaucracy no longer intrudes, a kind of culmination of the private spaces that are greeted with such hostility and suspicion throughout the film, and seem to require the most extensive and opaque recourse to invisible paperwork. What makes the film so incredible, then, is that this abortion isn't merely continuous with these bureaucratic structures, but a kind of epitome of them, a reminder that bureaucracy is constituted by its exceptions. In an extraordinary, extended monologue, the doctor employed by the two students moves from a hippocratic to sadistic register, condensing, intensifying - and, above all, enjoying - every unnecessary repetition and regulation that's gone before. In the same way, the film's numbing pace is condensed into the unbearable stillness that the doctor's suspicious insistence on performing a vacuum aspiration, rather than a dilation and curettage, requires on the part of the pregnant girl, as she allows him to insert a probe into her vagina in a procedure that causes serious, but not debilitating pain. While there's certainly a vision of how the Communist impulse was deflected into a new solidarity against the very bureaucratic over-regulation it spawned, it feels as if Mungiu finally wants to suggest some more general connection between abortion and bureaucracy, to present abortion as the locus of a certain kind of bureaucratic speech, or crisis in bureaucratic speech, if only because abortion itself is so aligned with the bodily regulation that drives bureaucratic speech, its mission to refine the regularity of the period.