Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 295: Tue Oct 22

Longing (Griesbach, 2006): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.40pm


This 35mm presentation, which is also being screened on November 1st (with introduction by Geoff Andrew), is part of the Big Screen Classics season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Few recent films have left me feeling more conflicted than Valeska Grisebach's second feature (2006), which is sensitive, moving, accomplished in its extraordinary direction of nonprofessional actors but also a little bogus. A gentle, happily married metalworker in a tiny village goes away for a weekend to train as a volunteer fireman and has a drunken fling with a waitress, which leads to tragic consequences. The most telling points in this story register in the faces rather than the dialogue, but it's conceived like a folk ballad and feels self-conscious in some of its plot developments and in its neo-Brechtian finale.

Jonthan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is an extract.

No comments: