I. Abortion and Abortion Law: Protection or Violation
A woman's reproductive function is an important factor in determining her subordinate position in the gender struggle with male feminists. But with the advancement of medical technology and the breakthrough of post-modern philosophical thinking, more awakened women are trying to break out of the prison of traditional ideology and reconstruct the discourse of femininity. Abortion has become one of the necessary technical means to fight for women's rights to freedom. But abortion has been a controversial medical technology since its inception, and male feminists have raised the banner of "morality" to ensure women's subordination to themselves, proclaiming the meaning of life and legislating to hide their class-based desires under the law.
Two Days in April is a cynical mockery of the total oppression of vulnerable women by a patriarchal society that has emerged around abortion laws.
The film follows a simple thread, focusing on the 12 hours that Otilia spends before and after she helps Gabriela get an abortion. In the half hour before the abortion, the scenes take place on the campus where Otilia lives, and the director even hides the motives of Otilia and Gabrielle's behavior in order to show a free and equal environment isolated from society. At this point, the director's veiled narration forces the audience to focus on one long shot of Otilia walking through the dormitory corridors.
The source of Otilia's purpose of booking a room on campus is still under the director's control, and the audience can only have the guess about the purpose of the behavior with a sense of distance after Otilia's booking is rejected again and again, and zoom in to show the camera the ordinary life encounter of not having a room to book, so as to achieve the effect of analyzing the state of social indifference. This unclear state of preparation even lasts until Bibi's appearance, and the mystery is not completely solved until the three of them meet at the unsatisfactory hotel. This purpose of the director is well understood; covering up parts of the plot of the event becomes a way for director Monge to deny the audience an over-identification with the characters. Through this interstitial effect, the audience can be kept in a relatively sober and rational state, thus increasing the sensitivity to perceive the metaphorical meaning of specific details. In this abortion scene, which pits multiple forces against each other, the director utilizes his mastery of language and scheduling to maximize the ideological function of each shot.
Director Monge doesn't hide the camera, but more deliberately exposes the camera's position in the scene in an objective position that doesn't overlap with any of the characters' perspectives. In the midst of a series of negotiated deals between the three men about abortion at the hotel, the camera only ever produces a complete overlap with Gabita's point of view as she invites a furious Bibi back into the house. Looking into the room from the foyer, Gabiata sees a wall-to-wall mapping of the power relationship between the two characters of Otilia and Bibi.
The rest of the film is purely objective and revealing, with Bibi twice examining Gabitta in bed, both times through a fixed-camera perspective perpendicular to the axis of the camera and a religious Madonna-style composition that shows Gabitta's slim, upright figure and Bibi's condescending and oppressive relationship between the two. Not only that, but Monge often uses zooms to bring out the center of power, reminding the viewer of what to focus on.
Also in this scene, director Monge even developed a set of rules for shifting focus based on the power of the characters. This set of zoom rules in conjunction with the traditional mode of composition became the most direct way to convey the composition of the power of the people on the visual scheme. In the textual setting, the director also made a very representative metaphor of the three characters.
Bibby's hypocritical face, the hypocrisy of his first encounter with Otilia, and his premeditated and unquestioning authority, are the symbolic reproduction of the abortion law that the men's rights activists set up on moral grounds. Only this time Bibi is using the abortion law as a threat to force the two men to comply. In this way, traditional ideology is hidden behind the law, no longer leaving any room for worthwhile argument.
The reason why director Mungiu is said to be a director with universal concern or a dispassionate observer of society is that, when analyzed within the text, it is clear that he does accept the postmodern feminist division of boundaries between feminists and women, and that Otilia's image is more in line with the image of women's roles in the minds of feminists, and that the aggressiveness she displays in her confrontation with Bibi makes Bibi feel that she has been forced to do something. The aggressiveness she displays in her dealings with Bibi makes Bibi feel its constant impact on the center of power in the closed environment of the guesthouse. Bibi then becomes enraged and reveals his true inner desire. And that desire became an irresistible command under the fear of the law, and Otilia committed it.
The two girls huddled in a blue-tiled bathroom to clean the dirt off their bodies after the deed was done. If Gabitta's coyness during the conversation was due to Bibi's irreplaceable and important role in the relationship between the two. The sobbing in the bathroom reveals the true state of his heart unvarnished.
Contrary to Otilia, Gabitta, who has no choice but to suffer in silence when she encounters the oppressive forces of male power, is a display of the standard image of women under traditional ideology. The way in which she covers up for her boyfriend before and after the abortion, while concealing the truth from her best friend who helps her, without any sincerity, also reveals the tendency of women in the gender wars. The contrast between the two women's very different characterizations is only one thing; the inevitable inner connection between being a feminist and being a woman is the deeper meaning that the director hopes to convey.
Otilia says goodbye to Gabrielle and heads to her boyfriend's house, where she is stopped by a receptionist who says, "The gentleman who just left has forgotten his ID. The camera cuts off abruptly as Otilia looks around for a moment with her ID in hand. Until the end of the movie, the director did not complete an explanation on this matter. What to do with the ID, the director dumps the burden directly on the audience, as well as on the feminists.
Two: The deconstruction of the love relationship
The love story, as a subgenre in women's cinema, looks like it could offer subversive potential. "The love story is predicated on the possibility that women have the potential to generate desire; thus, while it may have to build on the phantasmagorical nature of that desire, either by showing the failure of desire through the death of the heroine, or by showing the taming of that desire by marriage." But "it is precisely because there is so much at stake that the genre has the potential to interrogate the place of women - to explode before the condemnation of patriarchy."
Unlike the restrictive narrative of the first half of the play, the entire narrative is inverted once we get to the central event, and the audience becomes omniscient; what the audience knows is both known to Otilia. Beyond that Gabitta, Bibi and Dragut are no longer in the position of omniscient omnipotent.
It is also here that the director pulls away from the previously unstable perspectives to achieve unity. For the first 70 minutes, including the abortion scene, the point of view wanders between Garbita and Otilia. There is even a greater tendency to show Gabiata's inner entanglements. But in the second half of the movie, when Otilia enters Dragut's home to attend her boyfriend's mother's birthday party, the sudden humiliation of her boyfriend's elders is even worse than the words used in the conversation with Bibi, "In the exchanges with Bibi, he had been condescending as well: even when he growled, he used the words "Miss" or "Girl". "even when he growled, he used such words as 'miss' or 'girl,' though the sentiment was more akin to the irritation of a foolish inferior." Still, Otilia listened to all the contemptuous remarks without moving. In the restaurant dinner scene, the director frames Otilia in the middle of the frame with a medium shot, which is simultaneously crammed with a number of middle-aged figures talking about self-centered trivialities, but this group scene is not a jumble of gossip, and a closer analysis reveals that the main role of several women is to ask questions, and that several pointed questions directed at Otilia are posed by the women, before Otilia gives a simple answer, which is answered by the men. Beyond that, the women's conversation degenerates completely into the daily chores of frying and cooking. The rewarding kisses and the solicitous tone of the other women made Dragut's mother complacent. The look on her face that says, "There's nothing I'd be prouder of," reveals the submissive subordination of the women's community to the patriarchs as a third party in the gender struggle. However, Otilia in the center of the screen and Dragut, who occupies all the backdrop, are still the center of the scene, and the director doesn't care about the content of the other characters' conversations, so the dialogue doesn't follow the traditional forward and backward pattern, but aims the camera directly at Otilia, who is out of place in the whole scene, and in this situation, the more Otilia's expression wanders and becomes more distracted, the more the subtle relationship between the social relations can be highlighted. The more absent-minded Otilia's expression becomes in this situation, the more it highlights a subtle relationship between social relations that are mutually exclusive. Here the director does not use fixed equipment to control the long shot, but a slightly shaky hand-held camera to show the instability of life. The scatter composition of the group of characters in the center shot completes the portrayal of a college student in a certain situation who is being watched, has no choice, and is always confined.
In addition to the use of traditional film language skills, through textual analysis, we can find that there are three male characters*** linked to the abortion incident of Gabitta, one of them is Bibi, a doctor, one of them is Otilia's boyfriend, Dragut, and one of them is the boyfriend of Gabitta who causes her to become pregnant. These three characters make up a standard image of a powerful male and are layered to achieve a group portrait effect.
The director taunts the power of fidelity in male-female relationships through the contrast between the deliberate concealment of Gabitta's boyfriend and Gabitta's obsequiousness to Bibi. The counterpoint to this is Otilia's entwined love relationship with her boyfriend, where the glue-like kiss in the school hallway is completely deconstructed into Dragut's libidinous gaze at Otilia after some trampling in the hotel. "Don't touch me, I'm all sweaty." Exposing Dragut's false state of caring to the world. Otilia's shell-shocked questioning of Dragut also maps a passive position of women in male-female relationships.
The effect of Monge's contrasting look-and-be-seen relationship is in line with postmodern feminism's demand since the 1990s that "the utopian vision of feminism can no longer be pitted against the dominant construction of femininity".
The suppression of women by traditional ideology
When analyzing the political stance of the film, it is inappropriate to classify director Monge as a female film director. Our analysis reveals that in Two Days in Three Weeks in April, if we exclude the few inverted feminist perspectives, the rest of the elements in director Monge's film are surrounded by the traditional cinematic language system. "Director Monge abandons all manipulation of emotions" and strives to create an essentially strong emotion through the constant setting of suggestive details. So it should be said that director Monge is a director with a universal concern, who puts his thoughts on the current state of feminism in the text to reproduce.