Nussin

'Nussin' translates as a familiar, unprintable, epithet for making love, and the film's patterns play like an immemorial, sexual ritual. Paralelling sex and death, set in a small, snow-laden town, we follow two couples through a stylised plot of joyless parties, couplings, loneliness and alienation, crime (prostitution?); while another woman is walking on the snow in deliciously inappropriate glass high heels.

NUSSIN is a dance movie, all the action, though in modern dress, is expressed through ballet. This inevitable stylisation ironically gives the material a mythical stature as if the superflage of human affairs has been stripped down to the bleak essentials. Few films contrast the paralysis of its subject matter, small-town life, with its means of expression. The static austerity of the setting and subject matter, the dour faces contrast with the film's movement which is not through cinematic drive, or even dance, which circles in on itself, but the music, compelling tango, which urges us forward, almost electrocuting life into the plot when it gets too paralysed, ironising the melodrama. Of course, the tango being a metonym for sex and death, it can only go forward in one direction.