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FALLEN (KRIŠANA) a film by Fred Kelemen | Dimitri Eipides,
Toronto, Sept. 2005 In Fallen, iconoclastic German director Fred Kelemen ventures deep into the psyche of an average man tormented by a sin of omission and an unconsummated love. A moody, contemplative story of guilt and redemption set in the shadow of contemporary Europe, this is a film of sharply focused intensity - sparse yet precise and invested with a condensed, potent power. Matiss Zelcs (Egons Dombrovskis) works in Riga at the Latvian national archive. One night on the way home, he notices a woman poised at the edge of a bridge, but does not speak to her in time to prevent her from plummeting into the river below. He returns to the bridge the next day, haunted by feelings of remorse and moral impotence, and quickly becomes obsessed with learning more about the mysterious suicide. He searches the city for evidence of her existence - a discarded letter here, a photograph there - which he does his best to cobble together into a cohesive portrait of her identity. As he becomes more and more involved in the late woman's life and those of her friends, his conscience, increasingly burdened with regret, sends him on an existential quest for forgiveness and salvation. Matiss is a restless, tortured soul. Torrents of emotion rage in his
heart and mind without release; this profound inner struggle is echoed
in the streets of the city he wanders. Fallen is thus also a film portrait
of Riga, its textures and rhythms deeply imprinted on the sights and sounds
of Kelemen's spiritual treatise. Matiss's journeys through the city are
paralleled by Kelemen's probing, meticulously controlled camera. Shot
in a stunning black and white that evokes the classic models of cinematic
expressionism, Fallen is a visionary artistic statement of quiet anguish
from a unique, crystal-clear voice in world cinema. |