Most undeservingly overhyped movie of all time??

Brilliant and touching

Best movie of this year hands down!

A bit overrated, but still an amazing film

it is new demonstration about values and rules and game of influence from the East. a dark portrait of Romania, more complex than it seems be at the first sigh, impressive, powerful and touching. a mother protecting her son. without any price. an accident. and a poor family. and examples of admirable acting. from Romanian realities, nothing surprising. the family remains a fortress. many mothers , in the situation of Cornelia , are adepts of the same solutions. and this is the motif for discover this film. for the splendid job of Luminița Gheorghiu. for Bogdan Dumitrache as Barbu. for the levels of a crisis. and for the clash between two social circles. the basic virtue of the film - it has one of the most inspired ends.

The Romanian New Wave continues with Călin Peter Netzer's "Poziția copilului" ("Child's Pose" in English). Luminița Gheorghiu plays an affluent woman whose son accidentally kills a boy in a traffic accident. The movie looks at a number of topics: corruption, emotional manipulation and parent-child relationships. All of these add up to a general focus on the state of affairs in Romania, as the woman seeks to pull strings to get her son a lenient prosecution, and tries to force the victim's family to forgive her son.One of the most effective lines is "What parents can't accomplish they achieve through their children." One of the most obvious examples is shows like "American Idol". But beyond that, we see the woman chide her son for his unwillingness to grow up, even though she kept an overly tight leash on him most of his life.All in all I recommend the movie. Shot in a naturalistic style, it hits you hard. I hope that Romania turns out more of these.

A haunting slide-of-life drama from Romania, "Child's Pose" explores the strained relationship between a middle-aged mother and her adult son, set within the context of an unspeakable human tragedy. Cornelia Keneres, portrayed with masterful understatement and restraint by Luminita Gheorghiu, is a haughty, emotionally aloof woman who, nevertheless, just can't seem to cut the cords that bind her to her only child, Barbu (Bogdan Dumitrache). Barbu, of course, resents his mother's endless interference in his life, an interference that is only intensified when he tragically runs over and kills a 14-year-old boy who's crossing a freeway on which Barbu is driving recklessly. Because Barbu seems devoid of initiative in trying to make things right with both the legal system and the family of the victim, Cornelia launches into full Mama Bear mode, lavishing large sums of money in her wake as she attempts to clean up the life-shattering mess her son has made for himself and others. Is Cornelia now paying the consequences for treating her son as a child for so long? Is that why he now finds himself unable to step up to the plate and accept responsibility for his actions as a mature adult should?Filmed in a wholly realistic and naturalistic style, "Child's Pose" is about as far from melodrama as a movie about life-and-death issues could possibly be. There are no grand speeches, no emotional outbursts springing from the tragic events of the story. The movie makes us feel as if we are eavesdropping on these people as they go about the business of trying to make sense of an entirely senseless situation. As such, we get to witness first-hand the agony and grief, the bitterness and guilt, and the thirst for redemption that the various characters are going through. As embodied by the extraordinary Gheorghiu, Cornelia becomes a fascinatingly complex character made up of any number of inconsistencies and contradictions. For instance, she's constantly deriding Barbu for not being a man, for making a mess of his life and not fulfilling the hopes she and his father had for him when he was younger. Yet, it is her very insistence on meddling, mothering him and stepping in to solve all his problems that is the key factor in making him this way. And is she truly moved by the concerns of the grieving parties or is she motivated more by the fate of her own son and the guilt she might be feeling for the way she raised him?Flawlessly written and directed by Cailin Peter Netzer (with Razvan Radulescu as co-writer), the movie ends on a powerful note, one that hints at the barest possibility for reconciliation and redemption for the individuals involved. It's a largely wordless moment, heartbreakingly silent and obliquely shot, and it is a moment that will linger long in the memory of anyone who sees 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/