While not without its stilted moments and easy sentiments, “Mother and Child” is lucid, engaging, and novelistic in the best sense - even if it could have used that little extra aesthetic push that made “Nine Lives” so remarkable. In his new film, “Mother and Child,” Garcia continues his mission to dramatize intersecting lives of women, yet here his three main characters are figures in a single, elegantly unfolding narrative. The narratives themselves, surveying women from different classes and pasts and at different life thresholds, may not have been equally gripping, but together the film had a cumulative power, while certain segments (especially Robin Wright Penn’s supermarket encounter) could be considered short-film classics. Bringing to the women’s picture a rigorous aesthetic design, “Nine Lives,” made up of nine disparate segments about different female characters shot in elaborate single takes, successfully translated the structure of a short story anthology to the screen, and without denying film’s unique properties. In his 2005 film “Nine Lives,” Rodrigo Garcia did something cinematically unexpected.
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