MOVIE REVIEW | 'KRISANA/FALLEN'

The Mystery of a Life
By DANA STEVENS

Walking on a bridge late one night, a dour Latvian bureaucrat named Matiss Zelcs (Egons Dombrovskis) passes a woman looking out at the water. They exchange a long glance as he walks by. Moments later, she throws herself into the river and dies. Matiss, an archivist by profession, throws all of his research skills into a growing obsession with the motives for this stranger's suicide. Posing as the dead woman's boyfriend, he manages to procure her handbag, full of snapshots and unsent love letters. He grows increasingly self-destructive as he loses himself in a tormented investigation of the woman's last days.
"Krisana" (whose title translates as "Fallen") is an existential detective story with the austere gloom of a European art film. Fred Kelemen's stark black-and-white compositions and his love for empty rain-slicked streets evoke the work of the great Hungarian director Bela Tarr, with whom Kelemen, a German, has collaborated in the past. Though its story is slight, "Krisana" is a moving meditation on guilt and responsibility whose message is summarized in the words of one character, a cynical cop: "Hundreds of people go by us every day and we take no notice of them. But if one of them dies, we start to be interested in them right away."
The New York Times, December 9, 2005

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