Nothing Personal

Lotte Verbeek and Stephen Rea, two highly accomplished actors, take on this thoughtful two- hander from Polish-Dutch débutant Urszula Antoniak about loneliness and the difficulty of human connection.

Verbeek plays an unnamed Dutch woman who finds herself in Ireland after the end of her marriage and, having opted for an itinerant life free from life's trappings, ends up working on the isolated estate of recent widower Martin (Rea). They strike up an agreement: she will work for food on condition that neither exchanges any personal information about the other.

The deal works for a while, but inevitably resistances crumble and the pair form a strong and, for the audience, steadily intriguing bond. Their personal as well as cultural differences clash and then mesh, leading to a co-dependency allegorical to most 'normal' relationships.

Antoniak clearly has a good eye, and her performers give their all, but as the film's central premise – a Dutch girl wandering into the Galway countryside – is never explained (beyond the financial needs of a Dutch-Irish co-production), the result is perplexing rather than engaging. While Antoniak's restraint is admirable, from a dramaturgical perspective we are left to scratch our heads while indulging in shots of beautiful countryside.

The result is impressive but curiously forgettable, and feels like the idea for a short stretched out into a feature-length film (albeit one that cleaned up at the Locarno Film Festival). We are certainly pulled into the head of the main character, but as her puzzlement and anomie for the world increases so does ours for the film, so any chance of redemption (or explanation) is not just missing, it's redundant.

Antoniak is one to watch, but whether one could say the same for the film is not so much a question of quality but one of taste.

With additional dialogue the entire complexion of the film would have changed. And as a matter of fact, from a couple of critic reviews, I had gone in thinking there was to be much less than there actually was. The natural sounds become much more noticeable and meaningful, and are a plus for enjoyment. Rea is one of today's great actors, and one of the few very recognizable names that when you see him on screen, he takes over his character and you then see less of 'him.' Verbeek was 27 at the time, having just graduated from theater-school a year earlier. She is remarkable and I'll seriously look forward to seeing her once again... same for the writer-director. It's a small, simple little little film, but you'll find yourself think about it long after viewing it... and it will never age.

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.

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.

This movie is the director's ultimate fantasy. Through the brat girl, she projects not only her puerile attempt of rebelling against goodness on account of her own problems, but also her biggest one: her overwhelming and shameless oedipal desires toward her own father, in the image of the man, who, by the way, happens to be alone, sensitive, compassionate despite her millennial tantrums. The perfect ending to the fantasy (after she lies naked next to the dead "father", romanticizing thus consumation of the act), is that they won't have to live a real life together and he leaves all to her. Predictable,