Tout un hiver sans feu

I first saw this about a year ago in a theater here in Switzerland, and I recently rewatched it on DVD. Happily, it's one of those movies that actually improves with a second viewing.

Deceptively simple, Tout un hiver covers ground both personal and political in its portrayal of a grief-stricken man and woman. He's a Swiss farmer forced to work at a factory to make ends meet; she's a teacher from Kosovo working in the factory's kitchen. Both have experienced profound loss that has cut them off from the worlds they knew, and both are being forced to lean on their strength and postpone their suffering.

Because both are married (albeit to absent spouses) their compassion for each other is naturally frowned upon. But this is a movie primarily about healing, and all opportunities for cheap drama are never indulged.

Despite some strong festival screenings (it won two awards at the Venice Film Festival in 2004), Tout un hiver was not seen much outside Switzerland, which is a shame, as it was one of the best movies I saw last year.

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.

This harrowing portrayal of loss, love and cows is an emotional journey which juxtaposes a couples' grief at losing a child with the grief of the Kosovars after the genocide.

Jean is a farmer trying to rebuild his life after his daughters death while his wife becomes increasingly detached both from him and reality. The bleakness of the landscape, the unspoken blame for the death of his daughter and the pressure from his family weighs Jean down to such an extent that we can feel him carrying his burden as he moves about every scene.

As Jean finds farming increasingly unable to sustain him and the cost of care for his wife he takes work in town at the fabrication factory where he befriends a young Kosovar. Through him he meets his sister who lost her husband during the genocide. The resilience of the Kosovar community who have suffered such great horrors is contrasted with the private grief of a father.

The film is a wonderfully honest depiction of relationships and love, and if you allow it, proves highly rewarding viewing.

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.

I admit that I am the brother of Greg, yet I want to point out, that I certainly would tell him if he messes something up:-)

Mostly I'd like to comment on this movie to give it rather an inside view of the story it is telling. So the central message of this film is the question how to manage the fact of a terrible loss. On one side we have the main character, a farmer from the swiss jura, that has lost his child in an accident. On the other side we have the two kosovians (brother and sister) who also suffered a terrible loss during the kosovian war and took refuge to Switzerland. Both parties had an extreme encounter with death, yet they react totally different to it. This is the chance for the farmer to learn, that there are other ways to resolve a situation of grief and sorrow.

That's also where he gets cornered between two lives he could chose. On one hand his wife, full of agony, who has to get medical treatment. On the other hand his new kosovian girlfriend that surprises him with her will to live.

Wherever the movie was shown, always one thing surprised me. At the end nobody moved, nobody talked, the people just sat still and remained silent. I guess the ability to absorb an entire audience in such a way is rather extraordinary and deserves a high score, hence 9/10.