1. Abortion and Abortion Law: Whether to protect or violate
the reproductive function of women is an important reason for determining one's subordination in the gender struggle with patriarchs. However, with the advancement of medical technology and the breakthrough of post-modern philosophical thoughts, more awakened women try to break through the cage of traditional ideology and reconstruct the discourse with femininity. 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 abortion has been controversial since its appearance. Patriarchs raised the "moral" banner to ensure women's subordination to themselves, declared the meaning of life, and passed legislation to reduce their original class desires. covered under the law.
"Three Weeks and Two Days in April" is a cold mockery and deep reflection on the comprehensive oppression of women's vulnerable groups by the entire patriarchal society that has emerged around the abortion law.
The clues of the film are very simple, mainly about the 12 hours that Otilia experienced before and after helping Gabita to have an abortion. In the half-hour narrative time before the abortion, the scenes took place on the campus where Otilia lived. In order to show the free and equal environment isolated from society, the director even hid the motives of Otilia and Gabita. At this point, the director's veiled narrative forces the audience to focus on the long shots of Otilia walking through the hallway of the dormitory.
The source of the purpose of Otilia's out-of-school reservation sequence is still under the director's control, and the audience can only make conjectures about the purpose of keeping a distance after Otilia's room reservation was rejected again and again, and put the ordinary people who have no room to reserve. The experience of life is magnified and displayed under the lens, which has achieved the effect of analyzing the state of social indifference. This state of preparation, which is not yet clear, even continued until Bibby appeared, and the mystery was not completely solved until the three met in an unsatisfactory hotel. This kind of purpose of the director is well understood, covering up part of the plot of the incident has become a way for director Munghi to reject the audience's over-identification of the character. Through this alienation effect, the audience can maintain a relatively clear and rational state, thereby improving the perception sensitivity to the metaphorical meaning of specific details. In this abortion scene where multiple forces confront each other, the director uses his skillful language skills and scheduling skills to bring out the maximum ideographic function of every shot.
Director Munghi did not hide the camera, but more deliberately exposed the objective position of the camera position in the scene that does not overlap with any character's perspective. During a series of negotiation deals about abortion in the hotel, the camera only completely overlapped with Gabita's point of view when Gabita invited a furious Bibby back into the room. Looking at Gabita in the room from the entrance, what you can see is a graph of the power relationship between Otilia and Bibby, which is backlogged by the wall.
The rest are mostly purely objective exposure shots. Bibby checked the Gabita lying on the bed twice, and both showed Gabita's slender, tall and straight through the fixed lens perpendicular to the axis of the shooting angle and the composition of the religious Virgin. The jade girl's figure and Bibby's condescending and oppressive character relationship between the two. Not only that, director Munghi often uses zoom to highlight the central figures of power to remind the audience of the focus that should be paid attention to.
Also in this scene, director Munghi even made a set of changing rules based on the power of the characters for the focus shift. This set of zoom rules combined with the traditional composition mode has become the most direct way to convey the composition of personnel power in the visual scheme. In terms of text settings, the director also made a very representative metaphor for the three characters.
Bibby's treacherous face under the mask of hypocrisy, the hypocrisy shown in the first meeting with Otilia, and the authoritative demeanor that has been premeditated for a long time afterwards, is the embodiment of the patriarchal establishment of the abortion law with moral rhetoric. reproduce. Only this time Bibby threatened the abortion law to force the two into submission. In this way, traditional ideology is hidden behind the law, leaving no room for refutation.
The reason why director Mungi is said to be a director with universal concern or a sober social observer, the internal analysis of the text shows that he did accept the distinction between feminists and women in postmodern feminism. Otilia's image is more in line with the image requirements of female characters in the hearts of feminists. The aggressive momentum she showed in her negotiation with Bibby made Bibby feel her constant impact on the power center in the closed environment of the hotel. . As a result, Bibby was furious and expressed his true desires. And this desire becomes an irresistible order under the fear of the law, and Otilia commits it.
The two girls huddled together in a blue-tiled bathroom to wash their filth after the incident. If it is said that Gabita's submissiveness in the dialogue is due to the irreplaceable role of Bibby in the relationship between the two. The sobbing in the bathroom exposed the true state of his heart without modification.
Contrary to Otilia, Gabita, who can only choose to endure silently when confronted with the oppression of male power, is a display of the standard image of women under traditional ideology. Before and after the abortion, she tried her best to cover up her boyfriend who caused the accident without saying a word, but she hid the truth from her friend who helped her. The insincere performance also revealed the tendency of women in the gender war. For the two women's very different character settings, the contrast is only one of them. The inevitable inner connection between being a feminist and women is the deep meaning that the director hopes to express.
After saying goodbye to Gabita, Otilia went to her boyfriend's house. When she went out, she was stopped by the front desk attendant, "Forgot to take the certificate of the gentleman who just left." Otilia held the document and looked around for a while, and the camera suddenly cut off. Until the end of the film, the director did not complete an explanation on this matter. How to deal with this document, the director threw the burden directly to the audience, and also to the feminists.
The deconstruction of love relationships
Love stories, as a subgenre in women's films, seem to offer subversive potential. "The premise of a love story is that women have the possibility of desire; thus, although it may establish the hallucinatory nature of that desire, or express the failure of desire through the death of the heroine, or the marriage's effect on that desire. Tame.” But “there are so many risks that make it possible for the genre to question the position of women—before the condemnation of the patriarchy explodes.”
Unlike the restrictive narrative of the first half, after entering the core event, the entire narrative is reversed, and the audience Become the omniscient and omnipotent, what the audience knows is known to Otilia. In addition to that, Gabita, Bibby and Dragut are no longer in the position of omnipotent omniscient.
It is also from here that the director pulls away from the previously unstable perspective to achieve unity. In the first 70 minutes, including the abortion scene, the perspective is between Gabita and Otilia. Even more inclined to show Gabita's inner entanglement. But in the second half of the film, when Otilia enters Dragut's house for her boyfriend's mother's birthday party, the sudden humiliation from her boyfriend's elders is even worse than the words in the conversation with Bibby. In the communication, he has always been condescending: even when he yelled, he used words like "Miss" or "Girl", although the emotion was more similar to the anger towards stupid servants." But Austrian Delia calmly listened to all the contemptuous remarks. In the scene of the restaurant dinner, the director framed Otilia in the middle of the picture with a medium shot, and many middle-aged images were stuffed into the picture at the same time. There was no random gossip in the group play. Through careful analysis, it can be found that the main role of several women is to ask questions, and several sharp questions about Otilia were raised by women. The answer is followed by a male answer. Beyond that, the women's conversations are completely devolved into the daily chore of cooking. The rewarding kisses and the inquisitive tone of other women made Dragut's mother smug. The look of "nothing to be proud of" on the face is revealing the utterly subservient affiliation maintained by women's groups as third parties in the gender struggle with the patriarchs. However, Otilia in the center of the picture and Dragut occupying the entire background are still the center of the whole scene. The director does not care about the content of the conversations of other characters. Therefore, the dialogue does not obey the traditional front-and-reverse mode. Instead, the camera is aimed directly at Otilia, who is out of tune with the whole scene. In this situation, the more detached and absent-minded Otilia's expression is, the more it can highlight a delicate relationship between social relationships that are mutually exclusive. . Here, the director did not use fixed equipment to control long shots, but a slightly shaken handheld photography method to express the instability of life. In this way, the scattered composition method of the group portraits in the middle scene completes the depiction of college students who are under a certain situation being monitored, have no choice, and are always imprisoned.
In addition to the use of traditional film language skills, through text analysis, it can be found that there are three male characters associated with Gabita's abortion incident, one is the doctor Bibby, the other is Otilia's boyfriend Dragut, and the other is the cause of Gabita's abortion. Beata's pregnant boyfriend who caused the accident. These three characters form a good image of a standard male powerful man and achieve a group image effect through layered performance.
In the sharp contrast between Gabita's accidental boyfriend's deliberate concealment and Gabita's obedience to Bibby's obedience, the director ridiculed the power of the so-called loyal love in the relationship between men and women. Corresponding to this is the lingering love relationship between Otilia and her boyfriend, the glue-like kiss in the school corridor is completely deconstructed into Dragut's sexual stare at Otilia after being trampled in the hotel. "Don't touch me, I'm sweating." This exposed Dragut's false state of concern. Otilia's questioning of Dragut's cannonballs also reflects a passive position of women in the relationship between men and women.
The effect of director Mengji's contrasting relationship between seeing and being seen is in line with the demands of postmodern feminism since the 1990s that "the utopian feminist vision can no longer be opposed to the mainstream construction of femininity". .
3. The suppression of women by traditional ideology
When analyzing the political stance of this film, it is inappropriate to classify director Monji as a female film director. Aside from a handful of inverted feminist perspectives, the rest of Mongy's films are surrounded by traditional cinematic language systems. "Director Mongi gave up all manipulation of emotion", and strives to create an essential strong emotion through the setting of constant suggestive details. Therefore, it should be said that director Munghi is a director with universal concern, and he pines his thoughts on the status quo of feminism to reproduce in the text.
Director Munghi cuts through the specific incident of abortion in the film, insinuates the love relationship between Otilia and Dragut through Gabita's encounter, and deconstructs the seemingly stable love relationship into Dragut's love relationship. After Otilia's sexual desire relationship, the group image of the three male characters is processed to achieve a warning significance, and it is the ultimate reflection on the suppression of women by traditional ideology.
As far as the ideographic role of each paragraph in the whole film is concerned, Otilia's journey from Dragut's house back to the hotel is similar to the ideographic content of going out and throwing a baby. That is, it is concentrated in the fear of a weak woman walking alone being almost swallowed up by the indifference of the city. The increasingly rapid gasps and the increasingly unstable hand-held shots all convey Otilia's nearly collapsed sanity.
The director's handling of patriarchal frustration with female-minded students is progressive. The scene setting starts from a free and equal campus. In the paragraph of the hotel abortion, at this time Otilia and Gabita still hold a certain bargaining chip by virtue of the advantages of numbers and the existence of transactions, and this confrontation is specific. sensible. But when Otilia arrives at Dragut's house alone, she is confronted with a wider range of traditional social ideologies. Otilia is like an exhibit at the table, deprived of her right to speak, and Otilia, who has lost the protection of love, feels the established prejudice of her own identity in society (there are differences in class status and differences in sexual characteristics). ). The terrified Otilia stepped out of the prejudiced Dragut's house and stepped into the invisible pressure in the shadow of the city.
When Otilia got rid of the baby, she found Gabita in the hotel restaurant. Gabita sat opposite to each other for a long time, just avoiding important things and talking about trivial things. "No one of us will mention this in the future." Otilia finally bowed her head to the traditional politics under the entire patriarchal rule.
Director Munghi did not give a lecture on morality or policy in the film, but chose a more objective position to show the lives of disadvantaged women under the influence of the policy. In such an attitude, director Munghi hides his sympathy for women as much as possible. Therefore, the traditional film language format is adopted to match the writing method of the female perspective. The long silence at the end of the film is very reminiscent of Beratar's "The Horse of Turin". But the difference is that in the final paragraph of "The Horse of Turin" the two escaped into the endless nothingness together. In "April, Three Weeks, Two Days", Otilia suddenly turned her head at the last second of the film and looked at the "fourth wall" located at the audience's position. This is a way of forcing the audience to evoke the alienating effect of association, and finally achieves the ultimate meaning of warning value that the director hopes to express.
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