If there’s one thing filmmaking aficionados have come to learn over the years, it’s that an Omeleto-released short is always worth tuning into. Between all the boisterous and high-concept works sits writer/director Sally Lomidze’s Behind the Pose, which finds an intimate voice that’s likely to resonate with many who venture to watch it.
Discipline and conformity are the pillars of Masha’s (Ksena Samborska) line of work. A novice model from Moldova looking for her big break in the Big Apple, her fortune takes a turn for the worse when her manager Katerina (Natalia Volk) discovers her not-so-palatable habit: sweets. Enraged by this, Katerina cancels Masha’s participation in an upcoming photoshoot, which leaves the 16-year-old desperate for pictures for an upcoming casting—and at risk of deportation. With nowhere else to go, Masha enlists the help of her manager’s husband, Freddy (Rick Irwin), in a bid to score her own private shoot, only to find herself in a life-altering situation.
Behind the Pose is not an easy film to process, given its mature and unfortunate real-world themes of sexual abuse and harassment in the world of modelling and photography. Lomidze builds Masha as a free-spirited, well-meaning individual whose surface-level flaws are enough to get her cast out by those she trusts most, then thrown into greater danger when she attempts to trust again. Her exclusion from receiving a marketing package leaves her vulnerable in the worst of ways, and she is forced to call in a favor. Freddy takes her pictures, with Masha posing first in a plain black outfit and then a flowing orange gown that eventually rips by accident. What follows next is a searing, painful experience with Samborska at the forefront delivering a top-notch performance. Almost the entire short takes place in a tiny dorm apartment, making good use of the cramped spaces and empty, cream-colored walls to drive home Masha’s isolation from the rest of her peers. Irwin, on the other hand, is unassuming to a fault, slipping into a difficult role that saves its most shocking moment for the very end.
The film is a powerful deconstruction of trauma and Lomidze captures Masha’s plight with an elegant, outright dissociative narrative mechanic filled to the brim with bright colors and dreamy visuals. They appear at just the right time with a gorgeous score from composer Kai Engel to underscore an ultimate betrayal.
Behind the Pose makes for difficult viewing but benefits from a phenomenal lead in Ksena Samborska and some truly inspired storytelling decisions that bleed into its grim reality.
