Netzer: Pozitia Copilului (Child's Pose) (2013)

Insofar as the Romanian New Wave can be said to gravitate towards a particular genre, it’s been towards administrative or bureaucratic dramas, stories of characters trying to navigate a single process or procedure in the midst or wake of the Ceaușescu era. As the Romanian scene has built momentum, however, the procedural austerity and sublimity of such groundbreaking efforts as 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days has started to expand into other genres and registers – often comic – creating something of a secondary, subsidiary, even revisionist wave of films in the process. In some ways, Child’s Pose culminates both those moments, fusing the procedural severity of earlier efforts with a maternal melodrama in the vein of Mildred Pearce, but in such a way as to reiterate and intensify that earlier bureaucratic impulse. Set against the backdrop of Bucharest high society, it’s essentially a one-woman show, in which Luminita Gheorgiu puts in a virtuoso performance as Cornelia Keneres, a wealthy architect who sees an opportunity to reconcile herself with her estranged son, Barbu (Bogdan Dumitrache), when he hits and kills a young boy on a motorway outside the city limits. Having come of age in one of the most repressively bureaucratic regimes in twentieth-century history, Cornelia knows how to draw upon her extensive legal, political and medical connections – including those of her husband (Florin Zamfirescu) and sister (Illinca Goia) – to embark upon any and every process necessary to ensure that Barbu gets off, sinking us into the murky zone between bureaucracy and all the exemptions to bureaucracy she can find in twenty-four hours. At the same time, it becomes increasingly clear – as in so many of these films – that bureaucracy is constituted by its exceptions, with the result that Cornelia starts to feel more and more indistinguishable from the bureaucratic apparatus she’s trying to thwart, more and more at home in the murky, fluorescent-lit adminscapes that elasticise around every rule she challenges or traverses. The more she struggles for Barbu, the more she implicates him, and the more she tries to save him, the more she destroys him, leaving him utterly incapable of any action or even affect – except wishing the older generation would disappear – in an environment where action is everything, at least in terms of playing the bureaucratic game. As strange as it may sound, the result is something of a procedural melodrama, as Netzer suffuses every scene with a cloying, overbearing, overprotective insistence that every rule – and exception – is in place for everyone’s benefit, as if to replace the unadulterated hatred of earlier Romanian films for the Ceaușescu era with a sickly love-hatred, a learned dependence that’s even more disturbing and perhaps only visible with hindsight, or in a next-generation narrative of this kind. Shooting nearly every scene in frenzied, fractured close-up, Netzer anchors your ambit of thought so squarely in Cornelia than you’re never able to think more than a room ahead or recall much beyond a room ago, which makes you feel like a needy child and an ideal bureaucratic subject at the same time, enslaved to an era that may have ended politically but lives on affectively, perpetuating itself by way of the nuclear family fantasia - and melodrama - that was supposed to have destroyed it.