For many non-Romanians this film will be quite difficult to follow because the high speech content means subtitling is only briefly on screen and has to be read very rapidly, all the more difficult when it is on a lower off-screen subtitler as at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival just now. Sometimes I had to choose between reading text or viewing the image. Nevertheless, I found the portrayal of the self-obsessed control freak mother trying to get her somewhat pathetic son off the hook rather laboured. When two characters were conversing the hand held camera swinging from one to the other made me feel like a linesman sitting by the net watching the ball at a Wimbledon tennis match. This was either an intended 'artistic' device or they couldn't afford two cameras. If the former, it failed, and if the latter they should have considered old fashioned cutting and editing. I came to this film predisposed to Romanian cinema having seen the remarkable Somewhere in Palilula last year. I wouldn't describe Child's Pose as a boring European film, as one reviewer put it, but simply as a boring film, with the proviso that I may have missed its finer points due to the language barrier. How it won a Golden Bear at Berlin is one of those intrigues whose story may still be waiting to be told... Anyone care to find out and make a film out of it?
Review of Child's Pose
