Reviews

Susanne Bier's 2007 movie, Things We Lost in the Fire sees Halle Berry as Audrey Burke, a recently widowed woman, who enters into an unexpected relationship with a figure from her late spouse's life. If that sounds at all familiar, it's because there are definite parallels to Berry's 2001 Oscar winning turn in Monster's Ball.

With a looming awards season around the corner, it's possible that the studio considered this to be another contender to show off Ms Berry's acting prowess. Following rolls in the likes of Die Another Day, Gothika and her Razzie winning performance in Catwoman, it had perhaps escaped the film watching populous' attention that under some bad career choices, there lies a very capable actor.

Bier's film falls short of Oscar bait, but it doesn't have the feel of a film that's desperately trying to be worthy. There's a subtly genuine tone to the performances in the film. What could easily be over sentimentalised, Lifetime drama is a well-handled and compelling tale of love, loss, grief and recovery.

Benicio Del Toro performance as Jerry Sunborne, the deadbeat heroin addict whom everyone gave up on, except Burke's late husband, is well nuanced. The depiction of drug addiction is neither overly graphic nor monstrous, or apologist. It's commendable that Bier has taken a subject and showed a more accurate depiction. Those recovering from addiction can be intelligent, educated and liked people. They can be the person next door, or the person who walked past you who in the street and appear to be very average. This criminality of the drug use is most certainly the focus.

The building relationship between Sunbourne and his late friend's family is also well restrained. While the temptation might be to create an awkward love interest, the focus is more of the bonds that can be created through shared grief. Despite its themes, the film maintains an optimistic that only occasionally drifts into soppy sentiment.

It's far from a perfect affair. The performances from the children will take you out of the drama. They're often clumsy and there's a delivery in many of the lines, which seems far too rehearsed. Do children ever really speak like that? Bier's non-linear story telling is also inconsistent, seemingly dropped half way through the film. The relationship between Sunborne and Brian Burke (adequately performed by David Duchovny) doesn't quite seem believable either, but that's partly because he's too thin a character. The film starts to loose coherence when it comes to the larger story. However, the two central performances and character dynamics are strong enough to win this around.

"Would you care to die with me?" It's a question you'd perhaps expect to hear being uttered from one of Hollywood's more overused basement sets, rather than that of a stately German home during dinner. Austrian writer/ director Jessica Hausner's sixth feature is a study of death as an act of love in the midst of a Prussian Empire on the cusp of French-inspired political and social reformation. Set between 1810 and 1811, the film follows a young romantic poet, Heimlich (Christian Friedel), as he seeks out a partner for what he believes is a perfect act of love and the solution to his melancholic woes; a shared death. After his cousin spurns his fatalistic advances, Heimlich turns his attentions to Henriette (Birte Schnoeik), the wife of a business associate and a woman diagnosed with a terminal condition. What transpires is a drawn out courtship, with an underlying will-they-won't- they murder-suicide pact theme.

Far from the dashing romantic image a period poet might evoke, Friedel's Heimlich moves awkwardly through the picture as a skulking, slightly greasy weirdo. He's the Seventeenth Century love child of Max Schrek's Nosferatu and How I Met Your Mother's Ted Mosby, desperately searching for his elusive dream girl. Pursuing his prospective suitors and explaining his desire for this mutual suicide with all the cold, Germanic logic of a Kraftwerk track, "First I will shoot you and then myself". Still in Hausner's depiction of upper-middle class Prussian life, it's perhaps not inconceivable that his offer is met with more of a curious enthusiasm than it is with laughter and a one-way trip to the gallows.

There's a visually cruel symmetry to the set design. The rooms at a glance are large and grand, but their interiors sparse and utilitarian. Carpets, drapes and walls are covered with maddeningly geometric, repetitive patterns and each static shot looks like the kind of uninspired Seventeenth Century painting that one might find adorning a Twentieth Century biscuit tin. The colour palate is oddly muted. The characters move in precise, robotic motions, which seem designed to minimise the energy spent. Indeed, the stately group dance in the third act seems to ironically be the least choreographed in the entire film. It's as if this world, one where the sole form of entertainment is gathering around a piano to listen to a child hammer out macabre songs, would be so repressively dull as to make the offer of a late afternoon fatality a tantalising thought. Indeed, while planning their final moments, Henriette seems to have the sheepish smile of a young woman who's been flaunting her ankles all over Berlin. That's almost all the facial emotion that we see throughout the entire ninety-six minutes.

Ultimately, it's not all that easy to ascertain what Hausner's sterile slice of period drama is trying to convey. It could be that death, like social change is inevitable, so we might as well enjoy it, rather than hide from it in denial. However, it's a little hard to walk away thinking that the past would have been anything but a torturous purgatory, of which death would have been the kindest release. Perhaps mercifully, the viewers' time there is, in cinematic terms, rather brief.