Lotte Verbeek and Stephen Rea star as two lonely people whose lives slowly intertwine
NOTHING PERSONAL (Urszula Antoniak, 2009)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between Fifth Ave. & University Pl.
Opens Friday, November 19
212-924-3363
www.cinemavillage.com
www.nothingpersonalthemovie.com
Polish writer-director Urszula Antoniak’s debut feature film, NOTHING PERSONAL, is a muddled meditation on loneliness and the price of personal freedom. After walking out on her life for unstated reasons, a young Dutch woman (Lotte Verbeek) wanders the Irish countryside of Connemara, coming upon a cottage owned by a grumpy older man (Stephen Rea) who lives there alone, in the middle of nowhere. He offers her food in exchange for her tending to his garden, but at first she refuses, not wanting to have any real contact with other people, but she eventually relents, with one caveat: that he asks no personal questions of her, keeping their “relationship” at a distance. It soon becomes an intellectual boxing match as they spend more time together, deciding on what they each really want. Shot in Holland, Spain, and Ireland, NOTHING PERSONAL, winner of four Golden Calf awards at the 2009 Netherlands Film Festival, is a dreary and uncomfortable movie, with Antoniak’s heavy hand evident in nearly every scene, manipulating just how much information the characters will reveal, which ends up alienating audiences, who just won’t care about the two protagonists. There’s nothing personal about NOTHING PERSONAL, just a shivering coldness and chasm-like emptiness echoed by one of the jobs the man gives the woman; by the time it does start warming up, it’s too little, too late.