Tout un hiver sans feu

Beautifully shot, directed and acted, this is an understated but poignant exploration of grief and compassion. This quietly powerful story with its subtle, deep portraits of people's inner lives, their suffering and healing, is moving exactly because it avoids the traps of pushing the easy buttons and exploiting emotions in a simplistic way. And while the movie is slow and achingly sad at the beginning, it is by no means a "difficult" or "abstract" film to watch. The people, though they are clearly superb actors in a drama and not documentary subjects, are as earthy as they come, and they are real to the viewer in the way that great actors in a classic play are real (the main character brings to mind the great Bruno Ganz). The picture was shot in Switzerland, in a region I am myself familiar with, and the stark and beautiful landscape provides a wonderful metaphor for the foreground drama. However, this is not a particularly "Swiss" movie; rather, the characters are archetypes, and their drama is a universal drama, that is unfolding in many places and ways as we speak.

I saw this film at the 2006 Palm Springs International Film Festival. I like films that have a small central cast as in this with the farmer and his wife, The brother and sister from the factory and in lesser roles the wife's sister and the farmer's farmhand. Lot's of irony here with a man who's life has been forever altered by fire who because of that he prohibits the use of any fire on his property despite the winter which has set in. He ends up being in front of an inferno of flames everyday at his foundry job. Meanwhile as the ember of love seems to die out from his marriage new sparks ignite with another woman. The husband and wife are going through an emotional and mental meltdown while the brother and sister and their family are going through a re-firing of their mental and emotional sate of being. Long Winter Without Fire has a cold, icy look and feel to it. Marie Matheron as Laure and Gabriella Muskala as Labinota turn in fine performances. I would rate this a 7.0 out of a possible 10 and recommend it.

The movie's Europeanism is so conspicuous right from the beginning until the very end. The overall surroundings and thematic undertones make room for no speculations and discussions. Such is the weight of a European movie, which, though decently acted and directed, lacks the technical and visual grandiosity which we are used to seeing in American projects. The movie is touching, with a storytelling confined within a very dull way of living. It focuses on the weary life of a Swiss family which struggles to get by in an unsettling environment of a low-key community. On the other hand, there is an Albanian family (brother & sister) which happens to be living in the same community after previously being evicted from their homeland, Kosovo.

Kosovo has suffered a bitter war with the ruling regime applying an ethnic cleansing and eventually taking reign of the province. The war is over now and the regime is out but its presence over the years has forced many ethnic Albanians to flee the ever threatening atmosphere and seek refuge wherever they encountered open doors. One of the open doors was Switzerland which boasts one of the biggest Albanian communities in Europe.

The family which the movie talks about has been warmly integrated in this community and now it's up to them to survive the demanding reality. Therefore, the Albanian man finds a job at a metal factory where he befriends the Swiss man who represents the native aspect of the story. So, the smart thing here is that the director has managed to find the commonness between the refugee and the native inhabitant whose weary lives have led them up to striving for the same thing: money for living! The native Swiss is a decent man, industrious by nature and characterized by a cold European-like reticence. Whereas, the Albanian is much of a lovely man, warm and friendly – he is hard-working and intrinsically humane. The virtue that the director wants to give importance to from both characters is affection and dignity. He makes the characters to exhale their inner emotions whatever their visible traits seem to be. The men become good friends, they spend time together and they develop a sense of mutual belonging. During the film there are a couple of scenes which splendidly depict the way Albanians spend time together in mass gatherings celebrating and native-dancing. That's beautiful, for sure! These scenes also depict the nostalgia that they feel for their fatherland which they have been forcefully estranged from.

To mess the things up, the director plays with the pride of the Albanian man. He creates a secret relationship between two characters which will ultimately make things take an unintended direction, which in fact will happen to be very distracting.

As I said, this is a mild movie with a self-narrative storytelling. It is more about Albanians in Switzerland than the Swiss family itself. If you are curious to know about this, then this movie is worth watching. 6/10

The title of this film isn't very catchy, even in the original French, but it gives fair warning of what's to come: a motion picture in which much is to be endured and little is to be enjoyed. Tout un hiver is a glimpse at cross-cultural encounters that might put a Swiss mountain farm couple's hardship into perspective when the husband gets to know some refugees from Kosovo who've suffered much greater horrors. Jean (Aurélian Recoing) and his wife Laure (Marie Matheron) have lost most of their livestock in a fire that killed their five-year-old daughter. Laure has lost her mind as a result and Jean puts her into a psychiatric clinic, a step that Laure's possessive sister Valérie (Nathalie Boulin) seems to ill approve of.

Jean must get work at a steel mill to pay debts and that is where he meets the Kosovar refugees working there, including Kastriot (Blerim Gjoci) and his sister Labinota (Gabriela Muskala). Jean is drawn to Labinota, perhaps because she seems as grief-ridden and bereft as he does. Her husband disappeared six years ago when soldiers murdered a whole community. He may have been killed, or he may have escaped, but she is still waiting. Kastriot is friendly to Jean and invites him to Kosovar social gatherings; he hides his own traumas but at times has a short fuse. The Kosovars have seen their families raped, their throats cut, their houses burned to the ground.

The harsh but spectacular Jura mountain landscapes are a big player in this film. Cinematographer Witold Pióciennik's cinematography is impeccable and sometimes uniquely lovely. His close-ups of the principals spare us nothing---there's no escape from the fact that Recoing's and Gjoci's faces are genuinely expressive but the two ladies are overplaying their melodramatic roles, Matheron far too exaggeratedly nutty, and Muskala too pathetic and sweet.

Jean considers selling everything and moving somewhere else: a new start. Laure, who is perhaps beginning to become coherent again, is not enthusiastic. But like the rest of the story, this issue is something we keep going back and forth on without any resolution.

There's heavy-handed symbolism about crows against the snow, fire forbidden in the farm and big fire at the steel mill. Where is the Polish-born and trained Swiss-adopted director Zglinski going with all this? The editing is relentlessly arc-less: when we think Laure may be better we glimpse her engaging a a long mad scream of pain. Though Laure comes out of the clinic, and Jean has some warm times with the quietly accepting and ultimately cheerful Labinota, there's no sense of resolution; no sense indeed that we've gotten anywhere. Zglinski is obviously interested in the contrast between the warm Kosovars (parallel to the warmer and wilder Poles he knows from his own experience) and the more stoical and shut-down Swiss. But that's just a given, not a source of any revelations. As if the parents' terrible grief weren't enough, everything else seems exaggerated. The Kosovars are a little too celebratory and unpredictable. The insurance assessor is a dry, mincing creep out of Dickens. The possessive sister almost seems to have a lesbian attachment to Laure. The steel mill camaraderie has a consistently menacing and nasty air about it. One leaves with a sodden feel of unmitigated grimness.

Seen at the SFIFF April 2006.

Six months after losing their five years old daughter in a fire in the barn of their little farm, Jean (Aurélien Recoing) and his wife Laure (Marie Matheron) are facing troubles in their relationship and financial problems. Laure grieves the loss of their daughter and blames herself for her absence and Jean for his negligence for the fire; Jean is trying to rise from the ashes and somehow rebuild his life; and the insurance company refuses to pay the prize for the accident. Jean asks for a job in a mill to a friend to make money and support the psychiatric treatment of Laure. In his new job, he meets and becomes friend of the Kosovo refugee's siblings Kastriot (Blerim Gjoci) and Labinota (Gabriela Muskaa), while the Laure's sister Valérie (Nathalie Boulin) separates them. Jean feels the passion of love and sense of life in his relationship with Labinota, who had her life destroyed with the war.

This film is a touching story of traumatized people that had their lives destroyed somehow having their second chance. Jean, who lost his beloved little daughter, tries to overcome his grief and bring sense back to his life; Labinota, who lost her beloved husband in the stupid war, feels some kind of attraction for Jean but is bonded to family ties; and the weak and sensitive Laure, who seems to be incapable to rebuild her marriage and live a normal life with her husband again. The story is totally connected to the coldness of the winter, with the grieving of Jean, Labinota and Laure, and to the fire, with the fire in the barn, the fire in the mill, the campfire of Jean's employee and the flame of his passion of Labinota. I understand in the ambiguous and metaphoric conclusion that Jean and Labinota stay together in the end. The solid interpretations and direction make this little movie a gem to be discovered by fans of cinema as art. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Inverno Despedaçado" ("Shattered Winter")