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Austria 2004
Director: Götz Spielmann
Cast: Petra Morzé, Andreas Patton, Hary Prinz, Susanne Wuest, Dennis Cubic, Andreas Kiendl, Martina Zinner
Rating: -
Language: German, Croatian, English
Release Date: 3 December 2004 (Austria)
Running Time: 1 hour 55 minutes
The Movie Review
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Several years ago, on my way to find German-language movies to learn better about German language I came across this title... Antares. I simply want see a movie that has many dialogues so I can absorb more German vocabularies and train the grammar better. I simply all ears and all eyes for the language and not for the movie, so it can be said that I popped in the DVD with fairly no expectation, and I was blown away... What a splendid drama about life. This movie has got some honest-reality-portrayal that is distinctively European, and in this case Austrian.
What we see is the life of three different people that at first don't seem to be connected at all, but as the movie progresses it's crystal-clear their fate are intertwined.
In Vienna, Austria, we follow the life of a woman in her late 30s, Eva (Petra Morzé), who's working as a nurse. She lives in a small but nice apartment with her loving husband, Alfred (Hary Prinz), and a pre-teen daughter, but Eva secretly has an affair with a married man. She cancels her plan with her family just to see the man whom she doesn't even remember the last name.
After a cheating wife we follow the life of young woman, Sonja (Susanne Wuest), who's working as a cashier in a supermarket. She's a very jealous person who always tracks down the whereabout of her boyfriend, Marco Jukic (Dennis Cubic). But she loves him very much that she's even pretending to be pregnant just to get Marco to marry her in several months to come. Even though Sonja seems like a hysterical woman, but the fact is women do have strong feeling about her loved ones, and when Marco is walking their pet dog at night, is he cheating on her?
After a jealous girl we follow the life of a hot-headed apartment agent, Alex Rabitsch (Andreas Kiendl of Dead in 3 Days (2006)). He's truly an a$shole who used to beat up his ex-girlfriend, Nicole (Martina Zinner), and apparently is easy enough to go agrresive on every people he meets. But he shows affection to his little boy and seemingly trying hard to get back again with Nicole. Only that she has had enough of his temper and is starting a new relationship with a more romantic guy.
Antares is a truly deep drama movie, that plays almost like a semi-documentary. It is almost devoid of any musical score or soundtrack, thus making everything seems more real. And if we are talking about reality, Antares is great in depicting human relationship, their emotion, their profiles, their life and we see them through characters that we can find in our real life. There is no over-the-top, or comical or annoying character, only real people with their flaws and good sides.
Antares is a drama for the adults. I say this for several reasons. First of all, there is abundance amount of graphic nudity and seemingly unsimulated sex scenes, thus making Antares inappropriate as family movie. But I really do admire how the director made the nudity and the explicit sex scenes far away from being anything cheesy, let alone sleazy. We don't see nude or topless models with their perfect bodies having everything but imperfect acting skill, on the contrary, we see full frontal nakedness of the cast with bodies that most people have (with their own curve and/or uniqueness) but with great acting skills. The nudity in this Austrian motion picture is not intended to sell out nude for the sake of nude only, but it gives meanings to the storyline, it's an integral part of the story and it does move the story forward into another related drama or tragedy. Antares in depicting its nude contents is to be differed with those naked actresses in erotic thriller genre.
And second of all, the heavy drama in Antares is arguably can only be understood by the mature-minded viewers. It is a study of human life, about their decisions and their interests. We can easily relate to them because of their consistency in acting to be as real as possible to regular everyday life. The dialogues are something very helpful here, for the characters can feel both the excitement and repentance of their actions.
In the end, there is no winner or loser... The only thing left are consequences and the impact of what we have done to ourselves. There is no real antagonists or protagonists, every adult character in Antares has their own sin, except for one person only. And the ending might make you feel that it somehow needs a sequel, but it's not. Because in real life sometimes life is unpredictable...
> If you like Antares, I recommend these titles: Import/Export (2007) which also features Petra Morzé and another Austrian film titled Hundstage (Dog Days) (2001).
> Unique European Motion Pictures that will surprise you in various ways: Next Door (2005), Womb (2010), Melancholia (2011) and Romance (1999).
© iwan pranowo of Movielogy.com
Twitter: @movielogy
posted: Thursday, 24 November 2011 11:20 am
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