If you've been following Romanian cinema during the last few years you know that there are several directors working with realism in a way that feels fresh and compelling. Child's Pose (dir. Calin Peter Netzer) offers a chilly glimpse into the life of the ridiculously rich; the film discloses a country deeply marked by class differences, and it also shows a certain group of rich people so indulged by their easy lifestyle that they are alienated from reality - they can bribe their way into any project they take on, even when these projects comprise human relationships. Netzer's take on family drama is a dark and raw one, focusing on how affection intermingles with manipulation and blackmailing. A mother desperately tries to help and assist her son, who is to blame for a car crash in which one person was killed. The relation between the mother and the son is a catastrophe, and throughout the film, the mother tries to reach out to her son, but this hardly comes out as the pure love of a mother. Corruption abounds, on several different levels (social and personal). What I like about Netzer's approach is that the film rarely gets preachy or indignant, even though the portrait of the upper class contains many satirical moments (some of which relates to the characters' attempts to appear culturally sophisticated or as "being in the same boat as everybody else"). At the same time as this is a film about class, it's also a film about grief, a subject the director takes just as seriously, even though he tackles it with his own peculiar clinical cinematic style (all shots, even when they are busy, bear the feel of a penetrating glance).
I also want to mention Luminita Gheorghiu's performance - she acts the role of the mother, and I can't recall when I've seen such a complex display of iciness and emotionality; Gheorghiu really lets us take a stand on what we would regard as a matter of emotional bribery and what is to be considered as a spontaneous reaction.
No comments:
Post a Comment