Ein the rectory in Swabia, not far from Heilbronn. Lena, the pastor’s wife, makes breakfast for her husband. She cuts the sausage sandwiches for him, smears him a cheese sandwich for on the go, helps him into his coat and hands him the leather bag. A girl from the village has been murdered, the pastor is busy. But the scrap-ripe old Opel that he drives also needs to be looked after. Lena oversees the work of the mechanic, who is a completely different man from her square husband, dark, pale, with soft, enigmatic features. Later, at the feast for the dead girl, she sees him sitting under a tree outside the inn, and he takes her home. And that’s how it all begins.
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If this film came from France, one would probably be amazed at a small piece of radical cinema, a story in the tradition of, perhaps, Bernanos and Maurice Pialat. But because he comes from Germany, there were first complaints about his gloom, his barreness, his silence, the lack of explanations, the rigid attitudes, the sparse music. That was two years ago when “The Desire” won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival, the first in the series of festival and industry awards for German films that won the Berlinale in February for Fatih Akin’s “Against the Wall “was crowned.
What did the film get the leopard for? Perhaps one gets closer to the secret of this award when one speaks of the actress Susanne-Marie Wrage, who embodies Lena, of the legibility and at the same time closedness of her calm, beautiful face, as if from afar, the cautious humility of her body who is submission itself until he begins to deny himself the demands of his surroundings and give in to his own impulses. There is a scene in “The Desire” in which Lena undresses in front of the car mechanic, her lover, to try on a dress that he gave her, and the way Susanne-Marie Wrage plays it, you actually still have it never seen – this hesitation before one’s own exposure, the complete defenselessness; then the jolt with which shame is overcome and convention broken; finally, the shining pride of a woman who has nothing more than her aged body, already marked by time, to express her desire, which was awakened so late and unexpectedly. It’s about everything in “The Desire”, about life and death from the very first moment, and if blood flows in the end and a person dies in the pastor’s kitchen, then that has nothing to do with the balanced criminalistic trade balance of the “crime scene”. It is an act that objects to the order of the world, to the village and its inhabitants, to marriage and its instinct, to the pastor and his hypocrisy. The answer from the outside world will not be long in coming, but for the moment, the long moment of this film, Lena has the screen to herself like all the great heroines of the cinema, the goddesses, the avengers, the queens of the night.
Iain Dilthey, the director, came to Germany from Scotland, where he studied chemistry and pharmacy before going to the Ludwigsburg Film Academy. “Desire”, his thesis in Ludwigsburg, is also the end of a trilogy that began with the medium-length films “Sommer auf Horlachen” (1999) and “I will carry you on my hands” (2000). It was also about women struggling for their happiness and falling into disaster, about shaking the bars of the conditions in which each and every one is trapped. Dilthey said in Locarno that his films are “a slow progression”. You can already tell from the wording that he is not lacking in self-confidence. Dilthey knows exactly what he is doing, and this knowledge speaks from every shot of his film, which is only a cinema debut in its external form, but the work of a master in its internal logic and accuracy.
These faces, these streets, this light, these slow movements and dialogues – where have you seen and heard all of this? Back then, thirty or thirty-five years ago, in the first films by Wenders, Schlöndorff, Herzog and Fassbinder. Dilthey himself names Chabrol as a role model, but his film proves that there is a deep layer of everyday truth among the digital antics and comedy faxes, a fund that German cinema can fall back on again and again. Deep down and deep inside, in the province of desire, where every story touches the heart of things.
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