This film felt very personal when I saw it a few years ago. Probably because of what I was going through at the time. A relationship had ended. Loneliness was feeling too acute. So this film was reflecting my kind of solitary, revealing my kind of separation, speaking my kind of silence.
A nameless young Dutch woman (Lotte Verbaek) is backpacking through Connemara following what appears to be the traumatic ending of a relationship (divorce, his death?) Trying to escape the pain of it, trying to get away from herself.
She discovers a house that is home to a hermit, Martin ( Stephen Rea)
She offers him no warmth or friendliness. Their agreement is she will work for him in exchange for food. Nothing personal is to be shared or revealed.
They co-exist in mutual taciturnity with one another, as separate selves, as disconnected seemingly depressed entities.
But I’m wondering. Will her frosty feelings thaw? Will she let him in? Will they connect? Who will open up first? Why were they so alienated in the first place? Can they love?
And they do. Connect. And gradually come to one another, as two alonenesses, trying to preserve each, and one anothers, integrity. I liked how their developing ‘relationship’ avoided all the obvious romantic clichés.
There is a palpable, almost untouchable, air of loneliness permeating both of them.
I’m wishing for them to warm themselves together.
But this alienated and anonymous ‘You’ has contained and buried within her so many unlovely layers of loveless suffering (grief? anger? rage?)
And yet come the end, it seems she can trust herself to feel something.
For Martin has gone. He’s wrapped there inside that sheet.
She can now solace herself with sorrow, and maybe even love his absence.
I think that may be what is meant by the closing scenes.
I was still engaged by the studied disengagement and deliberate disavowal of anything as feel-good ‘easy’ as romantic love in this film. And it still felt very personal. Not so much for me. But for the director Urszula Antoniak. This film might have been her way of working something out, of processing the pain, of objectively catharting feelings so that they become ‘nothing personal’.
Dir: Urszula Antoniak, Holland/Poland
7/10
Windows on the World 