“Child’s Pose” is a tale of two lost boys. One is dead, the other merely lifeless. Barbu (Bogdan Dumitrache) is a worthless upper-class loser, the sickening and sickened product of lifelong spoiling by his wealthy mother Cornelia (Luminita Gheorghiu). Speeding along in his Audi at 90 miles per hour or so, he kills a lower-class boy trying to cross the road. Cornelia calls in the fixers, looks for a way to make a deal with police and sets about buying off a witness.
Calin Peter Netzer’s film is the latest effort in the Romanian New Wave, a group whose debt to 1970s American cinema seems obvious. The impetus for Romanian movies like “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” and “Child’s Pose” (in all of which Gheorghiu appears) is controlled fury at the injustice and tyranny of systems. Ordinary innocent individuals are as flies in a spider web, and the directors of these films ruthlessly, morbidly and sometimes humorously diagram every entrapping filament.
The Romanian films are deeply despairing and not a little cynical; American black comedy is a Skittles-colored rainbow next to the bleak vision of the Southeast Europeans. You could read these films as an exposé of the moral squalor of communist infestation turned permanent blight of the soul, but you could equally claim that it’s basic self-interested human nature, not politics, that has polluted all, or even that it’s all simply a story of class.
As subtle and careful and slyly disturbing as “Child’s Pose” is though, it and many others of its genus suffer from an airlessness, pacing like the growth of algae, a dishwater color palate and a dirge-like monotone. The drained, exhausted, stifling mood is a frequently punitive experience for the viewer. These films’ American ancestors (movies like “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Bonnie and Clyde”) were deeply sympathetic to their anti-heroes and delivered operatic ecstasy in each spectacular downfall. Romanian cinema is all shrug and no crescendo.
Surprisingly, though, after mostly ignoring the heart of the injustice it clinically examines, the mutually toxic mother and son of “Child’s Pose” do finally confront the family of the dead boy in an emotional third act in which Barbu, in a moment of liberation and responsibility, successfully asks his mother to undo the child lock on his car door.
Even here, though, Netzer maintains a frustrating distance, not quite revealing the answer to the question of whether what we’re seeing is genuine contrition. The tears, we can’t help suspecting, are the most cynical ploy yet.