Luminița Gheorghiu plays a controlling, domineering mother in Călin Peter Netzer’s award-winning CHILD’S POSE
CHILD’S POSE (POZITIA COPILULUI) (Călin Peter Netzer, 2013)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
February 19 – March 4
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
www.zeitgeistfilms.com/childspose
Luminita Gheorghiu, grand dame of the Romanian New Wave, was nominated for Best Actress at the European Film Awards for her devastating portrayal of a domineering mother in Călin Peter Netzer’s Child’s Pose. Gheorghiu (The Death of Mister Lazarescu; 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) stars as Cornelia Kerenes, an elegant, cigarette-smoking architect who immediately jumps into action when her son, Barbu (Bogdan Dumitrache), is involved in a terrible car accident, killing a child. Despite their recent estrangement — Cornelia and Barbu have rarely spoken since he married Carmen (Ilinca Goia) — Cornelia starts constructing a scenario, like designing one of her buildings, to keep Barbu out of jail. She and her surgeon husband, Reli (Florin Zamfirescu), along with her sister, Olga (Nataşa Raab), start calling in favors and doling out bribes while showing a stunning lack of concern for the family of the boy who Barbu killed. As the child’s funeral approaches, relationships come together and fall apart as parents try to deal with what has happened to their children. Winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, Child’s Pose is a searing examination of class, corruption, and power. Reminiscent of Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman, in which María Onetto gives a mesmerizing performance as an Argentine upper-class wife and mother who looks the other way when it appears that she might have run over a local boy, Child’s Pose is a penetrating character study that centers around the wide gap between the rich and the poor. Early on in the film, Cornelia, who her husband at one point calls “Controlia,” sits down with her dour cleaning woman and offers her a pair of used shoes, expecting her to rejoice in such wonderful charity. The scene sets the stage for what occurs later, as Cornelia believes money is the primary route to Barbu’s freedom, but it’s a path littered with more than just one young child’s body. The taut, razor-sharp script was written by Netzer (Maria, Medal of Honor) and Răzvan Rădulescu, who has worked on such other Romanian New Wave films as The Death of Mister Lazarescu, Stuff and Dough, and Tuesday, After Christmas. In Cornelia, they have created a woman worthy of joining the pantheon of classic domineering cinematic mothers.
On an insect-gathering expedition across a vast landscape of desert sand by the ocean, an entomologist (Eiji Okada) suddenly finds himself trapped in a kind of Sisyphean hell in Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Kafka-esque Woman in the Dunes, based on Kōbō Abe’s marvelous novel. The man — his name is given only at the very end — is tricked into moving in with a woman (Kyōko Kishida) who is living in a ramshackle house built deep in a sand dune; the only way out is via a rope ladder that local villagers use to give them their sparse supplies. At first the man thinks it’s all some kind of joke, but as he discovers that there’s no way out — trying to climb the walls of sand just makes more work for him and the woman — he has to reevaluate his surreal situation. Woman in the Dunes is a brutal statement on the futility, desperation, and emptiness of simple human existence. The man is reduced to one of the insects he collects in jars — glass is made of sand, of course — while the woman, whose husband and son died in this ditch, does the cooking and cleaning, their unique identities gone, stripped away by their pointless toil. They are left with seemingly no purpose in life except to serve the strange villagers who occasionally peer down at them as if they were animals in a zoo. “Are you shoveling to survive, or surviving to shovel?” the man asks the woman, who has clearly resigned herself to her fate. Cinematographer Hiroshi Segawa often shoots the black-and-white film in near darkness, the characters virtually disappearing for brief periods of time, while Tōru Takemitsu’s ominous avant-garde score adds to the intensity. Abe and Teshigahara also collaborated on The Pitfall, The Ruined Map, and The Face of Another, but Woman in the Dunes is their masterwork, a shattering look at the meaninglessness of life. The 123-minute version of Woman in the Dunes (there’s also a recently restored 147-minute director’s cut) is screening February 19-21 at 1:30 as part of MoMA’s ongoing series “An Auteurist History of Film,” which continues February 26-28 with Peter Emmanuel Goldman’s Echoes of Silence and March 5-7 with Joseph Losey’s The Servant.
Based on a true story documented in Georges Devereux’s 1951 book, Reality and Dream: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian, which features an introduction by Margaret Mead, Palme d’Or nominee Jimmy P. details the fascinating relationship between French-Hungarian ethnologist, anthropologist, and psychoanalyst Devereux (Mathieu Amalric) and Native American Blackfoot James Picard (Benicio del Toro). A WWII veteran living in Montana in 1948, Picard is taken to Topeka Winter Hospital after suffering from debilitating headaches and temporary blindness. When doctors Menninger (Larry Pine), Holt (Joseph Cross), Braatoy (Ricky Wayne), and Jokl (Elya Baskin) can’t find anything physically wrong with Picard — and wonder whether their unfamiliarity with Indians is limiting their understanding of his problems — Menninger calls in his colleague Devereux, a Freudian who is having difficulty getting a full-time position because of some of the unusual methods he employs. An excited Devereux immerses himself in Picard’s case, getting the direct, not-very-talkative Blackfoot to soon start opening up about his personal life, share his dreams, and discuss his military experiences. While the other doctors disagree with one another on what Devereux is doing, he and Jimmy develop a unique friendship, two very different men trying to find their place in life. Director Arnaud Desplechin wrote the screenplay (with Julie Peyr and Kent Jones) specifically for Amalric and del Toro, and it’s a terrific pairing, the former, who has previously starred in Desplechin’s
