Review: Child's Pose

City Paper grade: B+

Poised somewhere between Mildred Pierce and Medea, Calin Peter Netzer’s film is built on the solid rock of Luminita Gheorghiu’s performance as Cornelia, a high-powered architect whose protective instincts take over when her estranged son (Bogdan Dumitrache) is arrested for killing a young boy with his car. That Cornelia also dabbles in stage design is no accident: From her arrival at the police station, she endeavors to manage and where possible rewrite the circumstances of the incident, telling her son to edit his statement to say he was going the speed limit in full view of the policewoman who’s been interrogating him. Gheorghiu, the calming paramedic in The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, plays the opposite here, a malignant, if not alien, presence who only stops to consider the family that’s already lost a son when she realizes decorum demands it. Netzer is rather too enamored of the Romanian New Wave’s hand-held house style, to the extent that the camera’s anxious back-and-forth seems like more of an affectation than a stylistic choice. The approach does, however, convey the intended urgency in a story that amounts to a cry of protest against the corrupting influence of money in a society once nominally insulated from it, and a searing question about whether the end of Communism caused as many problems as it solved.