Heroes, pt 2; 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days

In a world saturated with the bad kinds of bad attitudes, Mark Bittman's bad attitude serves as an exemplar, a how-to guide for maintaining a bad attitude in the best way. He scorns this and turns his nose up at that, but concludes with gentle affirmations: I'm so against these nerds who say vinaigrette's got tricks, so against them; making vinaigrette's actually so goddamn easy I'm going to do it, and guess what, you can too.



There's a part in 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days when the protagonist scurries through a grim sector of a city in the middle of the night, the camera hovering over her left shoulder like a zombie-cam in a horror movie. Patches of the city appear in the shots' margins and you see the most indescribable, unexpected colors--a blurred grey-brown, a hazy purple-orange--and you sense the character's panic and displacement so sharply.

The film has one near-insurmountable problem. One of the main characters elicits incredible empathy, while the other--the person whose not-unsympathetic predicament sets everything in motion--is basically a psycho hose beast, a cowardly, thoughtless, simpering ingrate. I'm unsure whether the other character's depth compensates for this other lady's obnoxiousness. I wonder if having the antagonistic woman (the one who needs the abortion) be the person with whom one's sympathies would naturally lie represents an attempt to challenge the audience, or if the director spent himself while layering the other character with complexities?

One conversation in this movie between the protagonist, Otilia, and her boyfriend, just does not relent and probably will remind you of something you've thought and experienced yourself if you've ever cared about anyone, that is about one thing very specifically but more generally describes pressing against the limits of your love and trust for someone and discovering the indistinct but extant point at which you must care about yourself more than you do about him or her.

So, way to go, Cannes jury, I guess, this was a really good movie. It also did that trick with sound effects editing (cf. No Country For Old Men, um Last Days, a lot of other recent stuff), where everything sounds incredibly clear and present; a ball kicked against a car like a gun going off, a cigarette inhaled so deeply your throat hurts.