If you are a fan of art movies,
I highly recommend Salmonberries. The cinematography is stunning; the soundtrack
featuring kd lang is beautiful; and it is a film with a complex and unexpected
love story. (It's also one that many dislike for its quirkiness and slow pace,
but I think it just gets better with multiple viewings.) Kotzebue (lang,
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,
Teresa's Tattoo, The Celluloid Closet)
is an androgynous Inuit orphan searching for her birth parents in an isolated
town in Alaska. There she meets Roswitha (Rosel Zech, Aimée & Jaguar),
an older East German woman who runs the public library and first assumes Kotz
to be a boy. A woman of few words, Kotz strips nude to show that she is female.
Both are very lonely people without a sense of belonging, and somehow these very
different women make a connection and bring acceptance, love and light into one
another's lives. Their relationship has a strange sensuality to it, and when they
travel to Berlin after the fall of the Wall, Kotz attempts to make love to Roswitha.
She resists, but there is such a strong emotional connection between the two that
who knows what the future will bring. The dvd includes commentary from lang
and writer/director Percy Adlon discussing working with Zech and filming in such
a remote location (leading lang to write many of the lyrics for "Ingenue"). |