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
.......................................................................................................................................
|