I haven't yet steeled myself to watch 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days—Cristian Mungiu's film about the experiences of a couple seeking an illegal abortion in Ceausescu's Romania—but, reading Peter Bradshaw's admiring review of it for the Guardian, found one phrase in particular stuck in my mind:
…it is part of that emerging 21st-century phenomenon, ordeal cinema: a cinema that with great formal technique makes you live through a horrendous experience…This is because I recently went with my wife to see a very different film: I am Legend, a blockbusting remake of The Omega Man (1971) and The Last Man on Earth (1964) that stars Will Smith as one of the last men alive, fighting to reverse the effects of a virus that has wiped out 90 per cent of humanity and driven most of the survivors homicidally insane. The film's current title returns to that of Richard Matheson's original 1954 science fiction novel—but that wasn't at the front of my mind as I was compelled to spend a, frankly, traumatic two hours in a post-apocalyptic New York brooding upon the horrible destruction of one man's family, loved ones, everyone he ever knew, and everything he ever cared about.
The film has a—tenuously—happy ending and a great central performance; but I was reminded of the feeling I got a few years ago from watching Spielberg's remake of The War of the Worlds. The vision of destruction, human suffering and civilizational collapse was so lovingly detailed and viscerally realised that everything else faded into the background—as if the films themselves were essentially masochistic exercises in hyper-real suffering, and in the studied realisation of the worst of all imaginable worlds. Cinematic fantasy can now, effortlessly, look like cinematic realism; the only limit is how much we wish to shock and punish ourselves.
The world of 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, of course, is a historical rather than a fantastical one, and I'm sure it's quite differently (and more profoundly) disturbing and engaging for that. I'm not sure, however, that I'm strong enough for too much more "ordeal" cinema at the moment. As my wife commented on the way home from our witness of a hundred-million dollars' worth of fantastically detailed doom, "I feel awful now." So we watched Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960) on DVD the other night, at home. And felt much better afterwards.
