Nothing Personal (2010)

A woman (Lotte Verbeek) has suffered some sort of loss. She's playing with her ring. Strangers are grabbing her belongings left outside her apartment. She goes hitching into the Irish countryside. She stops at a farm where Martin (Stephen Rea) offers food for work. They collect seaweed from the coast to fertilize the land. She refuses to give him any personal information including her name. They find solace in each other's damaged lives.These two damaged characters are played by compelling big-time actors. It's a quiet movie filmed by first-time Polish-Dutch director Urszula Antoniak. It's all about the quiet which sometimes generates powerful moments. Mostly, it's just quiet. It's an interesting debut.

I watched this alone, in a foreign cinema far from home and found it highly resonant. It is a love story, and one of some sort of healing of the senses.There are some exquisitely observed scenes, the sensuousness of her running the seaweed through her hands (several times) and their connectedness with nature form a counterpoint to their individual alienation and personal sorrow, their unrevealed grief. That and the scene in which she demonstrates an extraordinary culinary talent reveal a refinement that he shows us from the outset with his solitary decorum.The gradual acceptance of their feelings for one another is well constructed although like at least one other commentator I felt the use of some fractured chronology was ambiguous and unsatisfactorily edited.There is the eventual, inevitable tragedy, punctuated with some (mostly wry) comedy along the way but some sense of uncertainty at the end. Whatever else it may be, it features two very moving performances that are deserving of any awards the film receives.

So I was quite pleased to see this, which, unbeknownst to me, has been a bit of a festival darling, sweeping all before it at Locarno winning six awards including the FIPRESCI, with multiple wins at the Nederlands Film Festival, and top prize at Marrakech.Director Urszula Antoniak was in attendance and said that this was her first film, it was very personal to her, and it was a perfect expression for her, she said she had all the means and finances she wanted and described it as a "work of love".Anne (Lotte Verbeek) has decided to start her life again and leave Holland, the milieu of what we can speculate has been a messy divorce, with nothing other than the clothes she is wearing and a backpack. She is in a whirlwind of pain and anger and has decided to reject the world and all people. She is quite rude to the few people she comes across. So she wanders through extremely beautiful and desolate Irish countryside scraping an existence.Eventually she chances across the most awesomely stunning peninsular hideaway, which took my breath away (location is so important in cinema). She is very rude and forms an uneasy symbiosis with Martin who gives her food in return for manual labour. He agrees to not ask her any questions, and make no demands from her outside of their contract.They're pretty much the only two characters we see. Anyway the relationship obviously develops but in the most fantastic and eventually heart-floodingly moving way, that renews Anne's faith in humanity and allows her to rejoin the living. I think the ending stuff is pretty iconic, and so well crafted in terms of plotting, so delicate. Very much of a feather with Esther Rots film Can See Through Skin which also won awards at the Nederlands Film Festival.I felt pretty much humbled afterwards.

Belying its' title, 'Nothing Personal' is clearly a very personal film. Set on the west coast of Ireland, this two-hander explores the decision to leave virtually everything behind and offers a study of loneliness and reconnection through a gradual re-building of trust. With strong performances from both leads, I was increasingly absorbed as their characters unfolded, and the film is at its' best in the gentle humour and the slowly developing relationship between them; there are some lovely touches and moments, like stopping the wind blowing through the grass.Unfortunately this undoubted emotional engagement seems to have come at the expense of narrative coherence. Whilst I don't expect everything handed to me on a plate, it felt quite an uphill struggle trying to follow the Director's clues about what was actually happening. I couldn't quite work out if the chronology was chopped up or not, and I felt the main device of leaving history unspoken between the pair was unnecessarily allowed to overwhelm plot lucidity at times, leaving me with too many unanswered questions for it to be a consistently rewarding experience; I look forward to reading the future IMDb message board musings of more perceptive viewers. I suspect the film will be compared to Ondine – similar location and 'strong, mysterious, beautiful foreigner' theme –and whilst undoubtedly more cerebral and emotionally resonant, it's a shame that its' increasing tendency to veer into a somewhat perplexing swamp rather lets it down.If you have a penchant for 'hands swirling round in seaweed' close-ups, then this is certainly the film for you – otherwise, despite its' spirit and intrigue, the level of confusion means that for me, it won't stay in the memory for too long.