QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN

A figure stands in interior darkness. Watching. She moves forward. She lies down on the bed. She sits up. She makes and eats a simple breakfast. She stands on a moving tram; the brown autumn leaves behind her. At her desk, wearing her military uniform, Sarah (Rebeka Poláková) details to the Commander his itinerary for the day, and fields requests from others for his attention. She seems content in her work.

One eventing, Sarah sees a woman across the street in physical difficulty. Perhaps she should help but, frozen on the spot, she stares. The woman starts to throw up – presumably she’s had too much to drink. A man appears from nowhere and comes to the woman’s aid. Sarah can’t take her eyes off him. The female gaze. He looks back at her. She looks back at him.

Sarah gets on well with her dad, a doctor, who she regularly visits at his surgery for health check-ups. She insists that tests are pointless. She may like her job, but she doesn’t have any friends there. At lunchtime, she sits and eats alone. Outside of work, she often eats alone in restaurants. In one, she sees the couple again. The man leaves the restaurant and loiters outside the window, watching her.

On the other hand, Sarah doesn’t get on with her mother. She thinks her daughter should get herself a man. After all, there are plenty at her workplace, so she’s really no excuse. The loner does have friends, though, inviting her mate Lenka to the battalion ball. Lenka wanders off. Sarah visits a bar, where a man talks to her. Well, at her. That’s never going to work out. When she catches up with Lenka by phone some days after the event, she learns that her friend has got together with one of the soldiers, Karel, and is now seeing him regularly.

Life goes on. Her mother visits that flat, and reprimands her for not cooking for herself. Enjoying coffee and wine in a restaurant, Sarah sees the man and the woman again, the latter giving the former a dirty look before leaving. Now Sarah is facing the guy. And kissing him. Of the two, she seems the more forward. She and the man are on a train. “Bienvenue à Paris”. They go round art museums. Manet’s Olympia (in the trailer), and you can’t help but notice how similar to the nude girl in the picture the clothed Sarah looks. Courbet’s The Origin of the World (unsurprisingly, not in the trailer), a favourite painting here at DMovies. They look at it. She looks at it. She looks at him. He keeps looking at the painting, not at her.

From here, a full-blown physical relationship develops. Of sorts. At one point, she kisses the guy and the image cuts to her in the office, immediately reminding this reviewer of the remarkable editing of the famous sex scene in Don’t Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973) where images of coitus are intercut with images of the same couple preparing to go out for dinner. And yet, when Sarah finally talks to Lenka about Martin (Mantas Zemleckas), she is quite hesitant to say whether she and he are actually sleeping together. Lenka and Karel’s relationship, meanwhile, is following a traditional path into marriage, pregnancy, and kids.

That touches on the very core of this movie, an exploration of secrets, acceptance and rejection. Some people are very private people, and with good reason. Martin is hesitant about relationships, and tries to explain why to Sarah. He tells her that he reaches a point where he feels he can’t go any further in a relationship, and however much he likes the other person, he has to leave. Sarah is an avid reader of books and watcher of theatre, and one of the books she reads, which he knows well, encapsulates this dilemma.

Martin, who works alone on a computer from his expensive home with stocks and shares, or some such financial products, has constructed for himself a well-paying lifestyle where he never has to go out and meet anyone face to face if he doesn’t want to. Eventually, she moves in with him. It seems to be going well. There is much talk about trust, and what people are like. Both people harbour secrets, as it turns out, which have considerable potential to devastate their relationship. Who can either of them trust? Apart from her, he doesn’t have anyone. She has her parents, her friend Lenka, her work colleagues. But how many of them, when it comes down to it, can be trusted with deep-seated, highly personal secrets?

In its final third, as revelations explode to disrupt the solid ground we thought was beneath the two main characters’ feet, this takes us into a truly devastating, personal, sexual and social minefield somewhere beyond the bounds of conventional mores. In the end, the only person Sarah can trust outside of Martin is her doctor father, in part because of his professional training and in part because, as a human being, he possesses a rare ability to help people rather than judge them according to pre-existing prejudices based around so-called social norms.

She certainly can’t trust her mother, who is so obsessed with her daughter conforming to social norms and possesses a desire to protect her from anything ‘Other’ that she starts to stalk both partners in the couple, which is not going to end well. The film never strays into horror movie territory, yet its final third remains deeply provocative, shocking, and upsetting. It would be fair to describe the whole thing as a drama.

It’s skilfully put together and performed, and in a way a difficult film to talk about because if you were to give away exactly what it’s about, that would be to ruin the first-time viewing experience for potential cinema-goers. The trailer does a brilliant job of representing the film without giving the various games away (there’s more than one). Ultimately, this is one of the must-see films of both the Critics’ Picks section and this year’s PÖFF.

Nobody Likes Me premiered in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.