How to evaluate the movie "April, Three Weeks and Two Days"

The background of "April, Three Weeks and Two Days" is set on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1987. Romania still explicitly prohibits abortion. The plot mainly tells the story of a girl's 12 hours before and after helping her friend to have an abortion. The film's open structure, long lens movement and cold tones all reveal obvious traces of realism. In terms of narrative strategy, Director Mongi uses a writing method that is closer to a female perspective to show the embarrassing status of women being squeezed in a patriarchal society. This article reveals the director's radical liberal feminist political stance through the collision and integration of the female perspective and traditional film language shown in the film.

1. Abortion and abortion laws: protection or violation

Women’s reproductive function is an important reason for their subordinate status in the gender struggle with male chauvinists. However, with the advancement of medical technology and breakthroughs in postmodern philosophical trends, more awakened women are trying to break through the cage of traditional ideology and reconstruct a discourse with feminine characteristics. Abortion and artificial abortion have become one of the necessary technical means to fight for women’s freedom and rights. However, the medical technology of artificial abortion has been controversial since its emergence. In order to ensure women's subordination to themselves, male chauvinists have raised the banner of "morality", proclaimed the meaning of life, and passed legislation to reduce their original class desires. Covered under the law.

"April, Three Weeks and Two Days" is a cold mockery and deep reflection on the overall oppression of female vulnerable groups by the entire male-dominated society surrounding the abortion law.

The clue of the film is very simple, mainly telling the 12 hours Otilia went through before and after helping Gabita have an abortion. In the half-hour narrative time before the abortion, the scenes all take place on the campus where Otilia lives. In order to show a free and equal environment isolated from society, the director even hides the motivations of Otilia and Gabita's actions. At this time, the director's veiled narration forces the audience to focus on the long shots of Ottilia walking through the corridors of the dormitory.

The director still controls the purpose of Otilia’s room booking sequence after leaving school. The audience can only make distant guesses about the purpose of the behavior after Otilia’s room booking is rejected again and again, and Magnifying the ordinary life experience of being without a house and showing it under the camera has achieved the effect of analyzing the indifference of society. This unclear state of preparation even lasted until Bibby appeared, and it was not until the three met in an unsatisfactory hotel that the mystery was completely solved. This purpose of the director is easy to understand. Covering up part of the plot of the incident has become a way for Director Mongi to prevent the audience from over-identifying with the character. Through this alienation effect, the audience can remain in a relatively sober and rational state, thereby improving their sensitivity to the metaphorical meaning of specific details. In this abortion scene where multiple forces confront each other, the director relies on his skillful language skills and scheduling skills to maximize the expressive function of every shot.

Director Mongi did not hide the camera, but more deliberately exposed the camera's objective position in the scene that does not overlap with any character's perspective. During the series of negotiations between the three people on abortion in the hotel, the camera only completely overlapped with Gabita's perspective when Gabita invited the furious Bibi back into the house. What Gabita looked into the room from the entrance was a diagram of the power relationship between Ottilia and Bibi that was accumulated by the wall.

The rest are mostly purely objective exposure shots. Bibby twice inspects Gabi Towers lying on the bed, both of which are shown through a fixed lens perpendicular to the axis of the shooting perspective and a religious Madonna-like composition. Gabita's slender and tall figure and the condescending and oppressive relationship between the two. Not only that, Director Mongi often uses zoom to highlight the central figures of power to remind the audience what they should focus on.

In this scene as well, Director Menghi even formulated a set of changing rules for the focus shift based on the character's power. This set of zoom rules combined with the traditional composition mode has become the most direct way to convey the power structure of people in the visual scheme. In terms of text setting, the director also made a very representative metaphor of the three characters.

Bibi’s treacherous face under the hypocritical mask, the hypocrisy he showed when he met Otilia for the first time and his long-premeditated and unquestionable authoritative behavior afterward are all male chauvinists’ moral-based behavior. A concrete representation of rhetoric establishing abortion laws. Only this time Bibby used the abortion law as a threat to force the two to submit. In this way, traditional ideology is hidden behind the law, leaving no room for argument.

The reason why Director Mongi is said to be a director with universal concern or a calm social observer is that if we analyze the text internally, we will find that he has indeed accepted the role of postmodern feminism in feminism. The image of Otilia is more in line with the image requirements of female characters in the minds of feminists. The aggressive momentum shown in the negotiation with Bibby made Bibby feel that she had no control over the closed hotel. The constant impact on the center of power in the environment. As a result, Bibi became furious and revealed his true desires. And this desire became an irresistible command under the fear of the law, and Ottilia committed it.

After the incident, the two girls crowded into a bathroom covered with blue tiles to wash away the dirt on their bodies.

If Gabita's submissiveness in the dialogue is due to Bibi's irreplaceable role in the relationship between the two. The sobs in the bathroom exposed his true inner state without any modification.

Contrary to Otilia, Gabita, who can only choose to endure the oppression of male power in silence, is a display of the standard image of women under traditional ideology. Before and after the abortion, she did not say a word about her efforts to protect the boyfriend who caused the accident, but she concealed the truth from her friends who came to help and showed no sincerity. It also revealed the tendency of women in the gender war. Regarding the vastly different character settings of the two women, comparison is only one aspect. The inevitable inner connection between being a feminist and a woman is the deep meaning that the director hopes to express.

Otilia said goodbye to Gabita and went to her boyfriend's house. When she went out, she was stopped by the front desk clerk, "I forgot to take the ID of the gentleman who just left." Otilia held the certificate and looked around for a moment, then the camera suddenly cut off. The director did not give an explanation on this matter until the end of the film. The director threw the burden directly on the audience and feminists as to how to deal with this certificate.

2. Deconstruction of love relationships

As a subgenre within women’s films, love stories seem to offer subversive potential. "The premise of a love story is the possibility of desire in women; therefore, although it may establish the hallucinatory nature of this desire, or show the failure of desire through the death of the heroine, or the impact of marriage on this desire, Tamed. ” But “it is precisely because there is so much at stake that the genre makes it possible to interrogate women’s place—to explode in the face of patriarchal condemnation. ”

Getting to the core event instead of the restrictive narrative of the first half. Afterwards, the entire narrative is reversed, and the audience becomes omniscient and omnipotent, and what the audience knows is known to Ottilia. In addition, Gabita, Bibi and Dragut are no longer in the position of omnipotence and omniscience.

It is also from here that the director breaks away from the previously unstable perspective and achieves unity. In the first 70 minutes, including the abortion scene, the perspective is between Gabita and Otilia. It’s even more inclined to show Gabita’s inner entanglements. But in the second half of the film, when Ottilia entered Dragut's house to attend her boyfriend's mother's birthday party, the sudden humiliation from her boyfriend's elders was even worse than the words she used when talking to Bibi. He was also always condescending during the exchange: even when he yelled, he used words like "Miss" or "Girl", although the emotion was more akin to irritation towards stupid servants. "But Ao. Delia still listened to all the contemptuous remarks calmly. In the restaurant dinner scene, the director used a medium shot to frame Otilia in the middle of the picture. Many middle-aged figures were stuffed into the picture at the same time. They all talked about trivial self-centered words, but this This group play is not just random gossip. Through careful analysis, it can be found that the main role of several women is to ask questions. Several pointed questions directed at Otilia were raised by women. After Otilia gave a simple After the answer, it was answered by a man. In addition, the women's conversation completely fell into the daily chores of cooking and cooking. Rewarding kisses and solicitous comments from other women made Dragut's mother smug. The expression on her face that "there is nothing more worthy of pride than this" reveals the completely subservient relationship that the women's group, as a third party in the gender struggle, maintains with the male chauvinists. But Otilia, who is in the center of the picture, and Dragut, who occupies all the background, are still the central position of the whole scene. The director does not care about the content of the conversations of other characters, so the dialogue does not obey the traditional confrontation mode. Instead, the camera is pointed directly at Otilia, who is incompatible with the entire scene. Under this situation, the more disengaged and absent-minded Otilia's expression becomes, the more it highlights the subtle and mutually exclusive relationship between social relations. . Here the director did not use fixed equipment to control the long lens, but used a slightly shaky handheld photography method to express the instability of life. And by using this scattered composition method of group portraits in the mid-range, he completes the depiction of college students in a certain situation who are under surveillance, have no choice, and are always imprisoned.

In addition to the use of traditional film language techniques, through text analysis it can be found that there are three male characters linked to Gabita's abortion incident, one is the doctor Bibi, and the other is Otilia's boyfriend Dragut, the boyfriend who caused Gabita's pregnancy. These three characters well form the image of a standard male powerful person and achieve a group image effect through layered performance.

The director ridiculed the power of so-called loyal love in the relationship between men and women in the sharp contrast between the deliberate hiding of Gabita's boyfriend who caused the accident and Gabita's obedience to Bibi. Corresponding to this is the lingering love relationship between Otilia and her boyfriend. The passionate kiss in the school corridor is completely deconstructed into Dragut's sexual gaze on Otilia after being trampled in the hotel. "Don't touch me, I'm covered in stinky sweat." This exposed Delacourt's false caring state. Otilia's questioning of Dragut also reflects the passive position of women in the relationship between men and women.

The effect of Director Mongi’s contrasting relationship between seeing and being seen caters to the postmodern feminism that since the 1990s “can no longer combine the utopian feminist vision with the concept of femininity.” The demands of confronting the mainstream construction.

3. The suppression of women by traditional ideology

When analyzing the political stance of this film, it is inappropriate to classify Director Mongi as a female film director. Our analysis found that In "April, Three Weeks and Two Days", if you exclude a very few inverted feminist perspectives, the rest of the elements in Director Mongi's film are surrounded by the traditional film language system. "Director Mongi gave up all means of manipulating emotions" and worked hard to create an essential strong emotion through the constant setting of suggestive details. Therefore, it should be said that Director Mongi is a director with universal concerns, and he places his thoughts on the current situation of feminism in the text.