Todestraum - Der letzte Zeuge schweigt

The main problem with Mike Figgis' overly arty 1991 offering is such a diaphonous plot it's a wonder he got the financing in the first place. His 1990 Internal Affairs had been a smash (and also one of the most unpleasant of the Nineties) so he pressed on with this beautifully lit slice of old tosh in which the leading man gets to look moody a lot.

Not so much a movie as a coffee table book screened at 24 frames a second.

On the plus side, Pamela Gidley is gorgeous, there's a creepy scene toward the finale with a wheelchair and nice to see Kim Novak back on the big screen.

Watch it for the great lighting and soundtrack and you may not be disappointed. Might be better to read a book as well as there's little point paying attention to the threadbare plot.

2/5

I was hooked from the first minute I saw this one! All my friends to whom I recommended this film, liked it too. And they said all the same. Good, you told us to watch this movie very carefully, and keep concentrated on it, constantly, cause it will keep you guessing long after you seen it! Seldom I've seen a film, so slow, but so good! It has such a strange feel about it, it's erotic and it has thriller effects, especially each time somebody enters the building. The leads are good, Pullman exellent! Mike Figgis is a great director, but he never made something good, as this, afterwards. Very nice photography, and good soundtrack.

Peter Piessens.

But given that, not a terrible watch. I read a comment about the lighting being special in this film. This really added to my enjoyment. I suppose that Kevin Anderson and his management expected his career to take off, because he did Leibestraum the same year (1991) as "Sleeping With The Enemy" with Julia Roberts, whose career was blossoming. Not that Kevin hasn't hit the big time since then. Who knows. Maybe he has wildly surpassed his personal goals. I enjoy his performances, including the TV thing about a Catholic priest a few years back. For DVD renters, catch the deleted scene. This is the coolest. The ladies at the Cat House, are also the nurses in the hospital. This revelation was the highlight of the film. For that reason, I don't understand why it was left out. There are equally explicit scenes that were left in, and they dovetail with the deleted scene. But, I was not the writer and director of Internal Affairs, successfully released the previous year.

I like films that are dreamlike and fluid, floating that wanders outside of the confines of self and story. At the same time I like them to draw fresh water from the well of mysterious non- self that underpins really anything that is exuberantly receptive to the world (passionate sex, dreaming, youth, all a part of it), wipes anxiety and restores our way of seeing to the far-flung horizons teeming with possibility that youth and early lovers know.

Lynch is a natural master of this deep swimming. Ferrara tried briefly at around the same time. Further back it was Rivette. A lot of film noir works in a similar way for me.

Here we have all these things; dreamlike in the way that Lynch is, about passion that dives in and perturbs reality, and a cinematic mind-bending swim in the waters. It's nominally a thriller, but written in waters, fluid about anxiety and self.

It has the noir engine where someone sets out to investigate and finds himself embroiled in mysterious goings-on. In noir that's usually a PI, but it doesn't have to be. Here it's simply a son whose mother has been hospitalized and he arrives to the small town to care for her.

He an architectural writer, she a photographer, both coming to explore an old building that is set to be demolished, but she has a husband. They unearth a story that took place in that building long ago, about illicit lovers discovered one night. We have some obvious symbolism in the building as obliquely shared past and as wandering through his own mind that is buffeted by anxieties.

And it has the notion of persisting memory where something that happened in the past is rising up again in the present. The noir drive is that the more he succumbs to passion, the more he is pulled as a narrator into a past story about similar passion.

So they fall for each other while he's unearthing a narrative of how that shattered lives one day. By investigating further, he comes to understand that he's tied to that story via his parents; his mother has been unwell ever since. There's also another son whose life is intimately woven to events of that night, an eerie figure like out of Lynch who by driving past the building one day causes someone to die.

It's all eventually made to align during a hospital visit late at night. Another invalid mother is wheeled out, central in events of that story. A metaphysical wiring between bodies takes place, bodies entered it seems by our knowledge of the story. The fateful coupling that upset reality takes place once more inside the building; once more a vengeful spouse is waiting in the shadows with a gun. But they say that they love each other. He's eavesdropping and stays his hand.

This is worthwhile stuff.

Noir Meter: 2/4 / Neo-noir or post noir? Post

This is a very good movie, as discussed by Janet Maslin in her NY Times review of same. It is very moody and "atmospheric" with a lot of silence between the lines, and I like that kind of film. The best part for me came at the very end when the Franz Liszt piano solo Liebestraum begins playing, and then during the credits you see the full performance (about 4 to 5 minutes long) by the pianist. I don't recall her name, but she appears to be very young, has long red hair, and plays like an absolute master. Thus I became a huge fan of Liebestrum, and its composer. Something similar happens during the credits of the movie The Pianist, where the performance of the piano music is actually a highlight of the film.