Child's Pose

Child's Pose follows Cornelia, an affluent and well connected Bucharest architect, after her adult son Barbu strikes and kills a boy while speeding on a road outside the city. She sets out at once through police stations, paperwork, and private conversations with witnesses to keep him clear of a prison sentence, and eventually toward the dead child's grieving family.

Serious critics read the picture within the Romanian New Wave, the loose grouping of directors who favour long takes, handheld camera, and cool attention to bureaucracy and class. Calin Peter Netzer won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 2013, and much of the praise settled on Luminita Gheorghiu, whose Cornelia commands nearly every scene through persuasion, money, and sheer will.

For a psychodynamic clinician, the film offers a precise study of maternal control and enmeshment: a mother who cannot let a grown son become a separate person, who reads his autonomy as a wound to herself and his crisis as an occasion to reclaim him. Netzer keeps the camera close enough to show both the suffocation and the longing underneath it.