Series of European films is marked by grit and gloom

The series' two black-and-white movies -- the French ''Regular Lovers" and the Latvian-German ''Fallen" -- use available light to paint a high-contrast, murky urban landscape to especially skillful effect. In ''Fallen," directed by Fred Kelemen, each character nearly falls into that gloom: Alina, an anonymous young woman who inexplicably jumps off a bridge at the film's start, an alcoholic police detective who investigates her suicide, and Matiss, an archivist who witnesses Alina's suicide and becomes obsessed with tracking down the pieces of her life.
''There's an open wound in this society," muses the detective. ''It's bleeding." But no one can stanch the flow -- certainly not Matiss, who stumbles about an unnamed Latvian city, his motivations unclear. The audience is asked to fill in the blanks of this quietly haunting film and share Mattis's curiosity about Alina's life, even when his fascination turns perverse.

Ethan Gilsdorf
The Boston Globe, 2006, January 18

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