Nothing Personal
Urszula Antoniak's first feature, Nothing Personal, rebukes exposition in favor of simple, composed imagery. What we learn about Anne (Lotte Verbeek) and her past is gleaned from two early images: A sidewalk full of possessions being pilfered by onlookers and a wedding band being removed from Anne's hand. There is no family, no girlfriends, no gay pals nor therapists to incite a dull harangue of her past loves, her tragedies and triumphs or her plans. When she leaves her apartment and sets off on the road, hitchhiking and picking through garbage for her next meal, we are obliged to pay special attention to her every movement and the few words she speaks to others because nothing else is afforded.
When Anne begins to camp out on the outer perimeter of a small country house and is offered a small food-for-labor trade with the home's owner, Martin (the wonderful Stephen Rea), the film maintains its early rhythmic design despite the introduction of conversation. When Martin asks her simple questions (her favorite color or number), she is curt and even hostile to his requests, even as he serves her exquisite meals made of spring vegetables, langoustines and oysters. But after hearing Martin belt a few lines of Porter Wagoner's "Rubber Room" and helping him with some more domestic tasks, Anne, some 15 years his junior, begins to warm to Martin and his way of life in beautiful yet dreary isolation.
Punctuated by intermittent titles -- Marriage, Loneliness, The End of the Relationship - Antoniak's engaging and well-acted two-hander is inarguably slight but shows immense promise in the debuting Polish filmmaker. For Anne, the relationship with Martin offers her a sort of cathartic exercise to excise her feelings for her unseen ex-husband; it offers a more enigmatic but palpable sense of resolution for Martin. The unerring focus Antoniak gives this seemingly simple relationship is at once its defining facet and a negligible boundary line for Antoniak, who also wrote the screenplay for the film. The actors are most open and active on a trip to a local pub, dancing and indulging in drinking contests, and the scene points to a lack of vibrancy in the rest of the film.
Indeed, the film might have been an awful bore had Antoniak not worked so well with two such gifted performers. Rea's consistently welcome presence has long been established and he brings his trademark, off-kilter charm to bloom here with his seasoned professionalism and humor. He is matched and often enough engulfed, however, by the Dutch-born Lotten whose pale skin and glowing-ember-colored hair denote the potential volatility of her character. Even as she sheds her glacial shell, Lotten is mindful of Anne's hesitancy towards structure and her ironclad sense of self-sufficiency. The film climaxes on a tragedy but the sequence of events is handled in a manner that suggests furtive, even mystical process rather than crass sentimentality and results in the film conserving its simple mystery without ignoring the emotions built out of minute, precise action and unyielding intimacy
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