Antares

Solid believable acting and good production values ...but I couldn't care any less about any of the characters. The plot is jumbled, superficial and not very engaging. Nothing gets resolved and the ending was very disappointing ...but by then; I was glad it was over.

Antares is one fine example how the accomplished director Götz Spielmann could weave the delicate cobwebs of the intricacies of human emotions so beautifully on the screen. Spielmann possesses the distinct way of story-telling which doesn't require flamboyant camera-tricks or racy scenes to spice up his story. There the characters evolve slowly and steadily but give you opportunity to learn a thing or two about the complexity of human nature. In Antares, the story loosely follows the lives of three women, crossing one another's paths couple of times. One has a fine family and job yet indulges into passionate affair with a secret taciturn lover. Another desperately wants to get married with her boyfriend, but is very insecure about him. While the third one trying hard to get rid of her violent and abusive ex-husband who could yell at her, beat her but couldn't stop seeing her! But in all stories the core theme is passion and ambiguity of human nature. Here the characters are provided with two options of more, but it's never so simple to choose one of them! Antares tries to explore the complexities of relationships and hence the lives of variety of people trapped into their own emotional webs, the urban way of living has to offer! Antares is all about the unflinching passion and endless yearning inherent to human nature. the director manages to stitch the three parallel stories seamlessly and the characters are left echoing in viewer's mind for long after the movie is finished.

This film tells three intertwined stories of the residents of an apartment building. This style of filmmaking has become popular of late, following the early success of Robert Altman ("Nashville" and "Short Cuts") and Alejandro Inarritu ("Amores Perros" and "Babel"). This one, however, falls far short of those films. Of the three episodes, the first one is the most interesting, featuring a nurse in a loveless marriage having a brief affair. The other two episodes concern low-lifes making each other's lives miserable. Neither the characters nor the stories are particularly interesting. Of course everything comes together in a predictable finish.

Antares is based on secrets and lies in the classic Austrian style, we know from directors Michael Haneke and Ulrich Seidl. Antares focuses on three women, whose paths cross in a building complex. A married nurse who has a lover that hardly speaks. The lover is only interested in sex and taking nude pictures of her. The sex and pictures are a tad explicit. The other is a young girl who is lying to her boyfriend that she is pregnant. The boyfriend is happy, but that does not stop him from sleeping with the third woman, a divorced woman who has problems getting rid of her ex-husband. The three destinies bond together in a refined way.

First off, the only reason I watched this is because the listing said it was in German (though I think the film is Austrian) and I rarely watch European films that aren't from the U.K. or France. In the first story, everything and everyone is utterly robotic, impersonal, and empty (even the sex). What's the point of even bothering with the sex when it's so meaningless and grimey? I suspect that people are giving this film more credit than it deserves because of the explicit sex in the first story, but they're gross, older people with flat, unimpressive bodies being increasingly weird. In the second story, we have a pair of selfish, co-dependent liars (one of which is constantly unpleasant and insecure) who shouldn't be together and don't actually even seem to be in love. You wonder why they even bother. In the third story, there are more miserable, unlikable people but worse because one is a rude, violent, woman-hating, bigoted sleazeball, and his wife can't manage to keep her doggone door closed to him even though she has no real reason to let him in. She keeps telling him it's over but keeps letting him in--why?? None of it moved me, though I committed to finishing it, but I just couldn't care less about the empty, unlikable shells of people. I can see why it got less favorable reviews by critics elsewhere.

S/N: The daughter's dancing is as emotionless and robotic and awful as her parents' relationship.