AFI FEST Los Angeles International Film Festival 2009

The couple experiencing a mutual crack-up has long been a staple of film—Antonioni, Bergman and Chabrol, to name only a few, have made it a central topic of their art—but it’s always an exciting event to see such a well-explored theme reinvigorated with the kind of freshness that the superb young German writer/director Maren Ade brings to her second feature. Vacationing in sun-drenched Sardinia, fledgling architect Chris (Lars Eidinger) and publicist Gitti (Birgit Minichmayr) are the opposite of the island’s reliably steady climate: Tempest-tossed, downright nasty one moment, thoroughly into each other the next, and, of course, ready to crack. Ade, who won three Berlin awards for the film, is less interested in “drama” than in the real ways in which intelligent and apparently strong adults are vulnerable to the vagaries of jealousy, insecurity and the quiet disturbances of modern life.

–Robert Koehler