Child's Pose (2013)

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Best movie ever!

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Romanian director Calin Peter Netzer's 'Child's Pose' is a drama about a rich, dysfunctional family in Bucharest, where one incident unravels the very fabric that holds them together.Cornelia (Luminita Gheorghiu) is the controlling mother who dominates this film, an architect with the right connections thanks to her businessman husband Aurelian (Florin Zamfirescu). She is estranged from her son Barbu (Bogdan Dumitrache), and blames Barbu's girlfriend Carmen (Ilinca Goia) for this separation. In fact, she spends most of her time bemoaning everyone in her family, completely blinkered to the fact that she's probably most at fault for creating such a hideous family structure.Barbu gets into serious trouble which will most certainly change his life, but how much depends on him and his family. He seems set on doing the right thing and pleading his guilt, as we would all hope. But Cornelia railroads her way to the front to play the devoted mother, closely followed by her sister-in-law, Olga (Natasa Raab). We see Cornelia the operator, manipulating the situation and dictating the lives of all concerned. She struts around in her fur coat, telling the police what should be done, namedropping others within her elite circle of Bucharest society, so that she gets what she thinks she's entitled to.Our distaste for Cornelia grows exponentially, such is her lack of remorse and disregard for all around her as long as "my baby" is not harmed. Everything she does has an ulterior motive, even her maid is wary of any communication she has with her. To witness the presence of Cornelia involves being undermined by her, with hidden meanings and veiled threats, all to illustrate who is in charge. Such is her need for control and maintaining standards, she even dictates the novels that Barbu should be reading. Of course, her sole aim is to get Barbu back for herself, she's not remotely interested in his life and his partner and couldn't care less about his predicament. Barbu knows the more his mother is involved the harder she will make her life. He probably prefers a life in jail just to get away from his scheming mother!As with other recent Romanian films such as 'Beyond the Hills', '4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days', and 'The Death of Mr. Lazarescu', 'Child's Pose' poses difficult questions in a Romanian society finally free from the Ceaușescu regime. This film is all about class, entitlement, and how one tyrannical system has been replaced by one thats just as bad for the majority. Gheorghiu is superb as the monstrous Cornelia, joining an ever- increasing list of mothers from hell in film. Just like the aforementioned films, 'Child's Pose' is gritty and occasionally heavy-handed but you have to admire its intelligence and single-mindedness.

More than 90% of the rich and powerful in Romania, who kills(by accident or not) a poor one, escape with little or no punishment from the state legislators.I would have liked, that the people who made this film had the balls to end it otherwise than how the rich wants.In the same pervert way, the doctor(who falsified the blood test making it without alcohol) and the chief policeman(who permitted and even suggested the rich to break the law) gained some kind of profit from the rich and powerful, the makers of this film had compromised and end it exactly how the rich wants(after all, it is they who pay for the making of the movie).I liked most of the movie(which is pretty much in conformance with the reality in Romania), even though at the same time i felt so much disgust seeing these fake people(the rich ones) acting without honesty, dignity, empathy.... This movie is not a winner. It is a looser, unfortunately, because of the end of it.

What would you do if your only son caused an accident in which a 14- year-old-boy died? For Cornelia, a successful Bucharest architect, the answer is clear: she'll fight and she's willing to do everything it takes to keep her son out of prison. At this year's Berlin Film Festival, Child's Pose was the consensus winner of the Golden Bear, the festival's award for the best film. In it, director Calin Peter Netzer portrays an overbearing mother and a member of Romania's upper classes, for whom she and her sense of family come first and then there is nothing for a very long time.At the same time, Child's Pose provides a chilling glimpse into a society in which everything can be managed if you know the right people and have sufficient amounts of money. With its in-your-face documentary-like style dominated by the hand-held camera which is always close but also still and distant enough to allow the viewer long looks into those faces, particularly that of Luminita Gheorghiu's Cornelia. Everything that needs be known is in this face: the hardness, the lack of compassion of a society in which the stronger always wins, the longing for a closeness this world and the laws governing it no longer allow, the scars it leaves.Cornelia is a control freak. In the beginning we see her interrogating her janitor Clara who also cleans her son's apartment. Matter-of-factly but with an almost diabolical determination that borders on the obsessive. When, for minutes on end we see her ploughing through her son's apartment, her loneliness, her isolation and her compensation through the stifling grip she keeps on her son become almost unbearable. This is also true later when she is left alone, motionless and helpless, in her spotless kitchen, a glass of Grand Marnier being her only companion. But then immediately she becomes the efficient, unscrupulous organizer who calmly persuades her son to change his testimony, coerces a witness into co-operating, uses her connections to smooth things regardless of the victims. When, at the very end, tears roll as she tries to convince the boy's family to drop charges, the question how much of this is real and if it is, who is she crying for, has become unsolvable.But Cornelia is no monster: the scariest part of the film is how perfectly she fits into this world, how acceptable all that she does is: to her husband, her friends, even the police. If her son rebels, it is against her overbearing nature, not her questionable tactics. This son, too, is a scarred individual, a selfish loner who needs to be if not at the center of attention than at least at the center of his world. Bogdan Dumitrache plays this Barbu as a childish, weak, hostile, cowardly man who is way too similar to his mother for his own good, product and symbol of a society in which money can buy you anything. Child's Pose shows how a corrupt world that has lost its balance and its center deform those who live in it, particularly, those who think they rule it, those who built t in the first place. But there is hope: in the quiet dignity of the boy's parents and maybe even in that quietly improvised gesture Barbu musters up in the end and which we watch from a distance, from inside a car. A small hint of an ultimate emancipation, a tiny act of growing up, almost imperceptible, but even more earth- shattering for it.Child's Pose is a relentlessly honest film that keeps us watching when we want to turn our eyes away, that provides an unfiltered, direct, in- your-face perspective on a world so shiny on the surface and so hollow beneath. And it is a chilling portrait of people struggling and failing to avoid loneliness, longing for each other, but drifting apart the more they're clinging to the other. Calin Peter Netzer's naturalistic style is far from heavy, it never imposes itself on the film, it forces us to keep looking, to stay close to this woman fighting like a lioness for her child while overstepping all lines of what we might call morality, asking us what we would do, where our limits are and how much we'd weigh morals when all we care about is at stake. This Cornelia is so far and so near at the same time. A chilling, moving film not at all easy to forget.http://stagescreen.wordpress.com/

I am really really surprised by the good ratings this one is receiving - I was in the cinema for this and for other Berlinale films and this one got only courtesy applause (and compared to Krugovi practically no applause). Never mind it won the golden bear - i stick with the audience on this.The hand-held camera is awful, making you seasick very quickly, the film doesn't manage to create any mood and does not even know what it is about.It could be about many topics - the social problems in Romania, corruption in Romania, overprotective Balkan mothers (I know a lot) and what they do to their children or maybe the struggle of such a child against its mother, the lack of responsibility in the society, even about the conditions of the roads in Romania.Well, the film chooses none of it. It goes on and on, without getting a point, without getting a direction, without even understanding the situation in my opinion.This one became perfectly clear to me once I saw a short interview with the director, who was talking something about Oedipus complex - the one thing which was not even partially in the movie. Yeah, by the way - he did talk about this in Romanian - i guess 15 years in Germany didn't make him learn the language.So if you like a lot of minute longs sequences leading to nowhere, films which make no point and have no direction, can't even decide whether a driver killing a child did something bad (yeah, he feels a bit bad, but well, he is sorry, see, so it's OK to drive with 140 on Romanian roads, poor poor guy) - this is all you need.I for my part would warn anyone - do not waste your time - there is nothing here.