Next Monday (10 December), Sommerville replaces The Dinner Guest with Four Minutes (Vier Minuten) – a highly taut German character study. This film follows the elderly piano tutor Traude Kruger (Monica Bleibtreu), as she struggles to impart some musical knowledge onto Jenny (Hannah Herzsprung), a gifted but traumatised inmate at the woman’s penitentiary. Though the two women are divided by age and by experience, a potent, almost electric, relationship develops between them, forcing them both to come to terms with the weight of their pasts as they titter perilously between sanity and hysteria. And far from diverging into a sloppy fairytale about the transformative power of music, Four Minutes remains captivating in its complexity; positioning music simultaneously as the interest that unites the woman, and as the force that divides and torments them. Get ready for another darkly enthralling offering from Germany, propelled by a powerful soundtrack and two near-flawless performances.
Rating: 8.0
Meanwhile, at Sommerville’s sister cinema, Joondalup Pines (located at ECU Joondalup), the PIAF film seasons gets started with Outsourced – a cross-cultural romantic comedy set against the backdrop of call centre chaos. The zaniness begins when Todd Anderson (Josh Hamilton) is forced to swap his comfortable Seattle office cubicle for a dingy building in the middle on the outskirts of an Indian city. Here, his new job to educate Indian telemarketing staff in the art of sounding American. More cynical cinema-goers will be frustrated by Todd’s extreme cultural ignorance, as well as by the unrealistic and somewhat simple romance that develops between him and the vivacious Asha (Ayesha Dharker), one of his staff members. Nonetheless, there’s something quite delightfully humorous about this brazen culture clash (nothing beats the comedic impact of a cow nonchalantly wandering through an office), and there is relief to be found in other moments of the film, when the scriptwriters’ demonstrate an astute ability to portray those more nuanced cultural differences, and inevitable cultural similarities.
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