A tragic accident forms the thread of this drama about a mother and her adult son. As far as I can tell, the film’s star, Luminita Gheorghiu, has been in every Romanian movie I’ve seen — The Death of Mr. Lazarescu…4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days…12:08 East of Bucharest…Beyond the Hills — but here gets a tour de force role playing Cornelia, a married, 60ish architect who tries to fix things when her son (Bogdan Dumitrache) speeds into a teenage boy, killing him. At first, the story suggests a commentary on class — Cornelia is comfortably well off compared to the victim’s family — and corruption, perhaps even a police procedural. Cornelia bullies the officers conducting the investigation and even bullies her own son into changing his statement.
The second half of the movie, though, moves more directly into the personal. We see why her son has been avoiding her, but for a long time he himself barely speaks. The title of the movie is a little oblique; it might refer to the son, who is married but retains a childish passivity at times, or his mother, whose love is the selfish love of a child. (Stylistically, the film is very much of a piece with the films above. Shot with little artifice, the film has no score and features handheld camera work. Many of the scenes are long. Despite this, the pacing is much faster than The Death of Mr. Lazarescu or Beyond the Hills. It’s a fairly short film that ends with an emotionally revelatory (though still ambiguous in terms of plot and interpretation) sequence that makes the heroine, if not exactly likeable (she rarely is), then human, and wonderfully complex.
IMDb link
viewed 2/19/14 7:30 at Gershman Y (PFS screening) and posted 2/19/14
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