Jerichow (Germany 2008) / Der Architekt (Germany 2009)

"Jerichow" is the first of two movies I want to write about that have one thing in common: they are set far off in the country side and hardly anybody says a word. A classical triangle-story: the driver falls in love with his boss's wife. The boss saved the wife from prison with lots of money, for which reason she is bound to him. (She'll get the debt back in case they break off.) The lovers decide to kill the boss in an accident-like manoevre, directing his car down the cliff into the ocean. But in the supposedly last talk he breaks it to his wife that he's deadly ill and asks her to take care of him. Unfortunately, a moment later he finds out about the affair and kills himself, directing his car down the cliff into the ocean. Now there's a complicated ending! This movie is set in deserted Brandenburg, the second one is set in a village in Bavaria which is cut off from civilisation by snow: "Der Architekt" (Bierbichler) is a nasty guy who bawls at his family without apparent reasons. Except he is stressed, and, of course, he had a sad childhood with a mother-dragon. Who is dead now. Which is why his family accompanies him to his home village for the first time in a long time. In the village also live his lover and her (and his) son: No doubt a stressful constellation. I don't even remember the plot, except the revelations are awquard all through. And there are some surprising elements: like to see a naked old man, and that he kisses his daughter (but nobody comments on it ever, and it doesn't evolve into an incest story). Mainly everybody is behaving extravagantly excentrically in the movie, displaying the distress they must be feeling on discovering the family tragedy. (Nobody talks of the distress they are feeling.) The similar connection in both movies between far-off-setting and speechless complicated constellations struck me. The rural, isolated setting seems very appropriate as a background for relationships from which you can't escape, and which intensify love and family conflicts, if only by lack of alternative (alternative relationships, alternative topics: there's only the woods / the mountains / the sea and US). It makes both of them intense and purish and (despite all nature) slightly artificial.