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Das Herz ist ein dunkler Wald – Bourgeois Sex Runs Amok
By Tatjana Turanskj | August 12, 2008
Das Herz ist ein dunkler Wald (Germany, 2007), the second film by actress-director Nicolette Krebitz, is an exceedingly stylized film about real existing sexual relations in the (petite) bourgeois world. The middle-class housewife and mother Marie (Nina Hoss) discovers that her husband, a successful musician (Devid Striesow) has not only betrayed her, but that he has also been leading an almost identical life with a mutual acquaintance (Franziska Petri).
Marie runs headlong into a state of emergency. She shifts gears between depression and cold anger. Then, deciding to act, she follows her husband to a bizarre castle festival to confront him with the facts. At the party Marie looks utterly out of place. Surreal scenes mix with awesomely observed party preparations. With the cook (Monica Bleibtreu) Marie talks about Callas, triggering the Medea motif. In the ladies room she overhears unambiguous women’s talk, she brings strange children to bed, and suddenly sitting in an armchair she sees her father, who as narrow-minded patriarch has little understanding for her. As for her husband, she doesn’t encounter him at all, but in fact she doesn’t even look for him. At dawn, after a one-night-stand she returns home naked (!) in a public bus to her suburban hell.
In the last scene of The Heart Is a Dark Forest we hear three shots. Perhaps she’s killed herself. Perhaps also her two children. But then maybe not. It’s not the story that renders this film so interesting and worth seeing. For here it’s more a matter of the psyche of a betrayed wife. It’s now do or die. It’s about absent fathers, an impeded career, and a life never really live; it’s about a nonexistent emancipation in Germany. Nina Hoss, personifies with the grand air and dignity a modern woman, who herself can’t really believe what has become of her. From a gifted violinist to a “German mother,” a suburban housewife and betrayed wife. An incurably sick romantic, who stoically and with dignity looks squarely at a wasted life and yet, besides her misery and cold anger, still possesses a gallows humor.
It’s indeed remarkable how Nicolette Krebitz has filmed this sexual drama and has found striking images (camera: Bella Halben) to tell her story. Skillfully she mixes different visual and narrative style elements: there are both surreal and fantastic moments, clearly film citations. The flashbacks in which Marie inspects her apparent happy marriage take place on a stage in rehearsal costumes. Due to this mix the boldly directed everyday and family scenes can be rendered all the more luminous and sparkling. And below this glamorous surface of stylization murmurs a feminist message: sexual relations are historical relations. Historical relations are alterable.
– Tatjana Turanskyj
has made four films with the filmkollektiv hangover ltd.* She now makes films at her own risk.
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