“Talent knows when to stop.”
There are so many unspoken emotions and feelings that are carefully presented in Urszula Antoniak’ Nothing Personal that you can almost feel every touch, smell the potatoes boiling and listen past those headphones feeling every beat of the classic music playing along. Nothing Personal works like magic in a wonderful countryside. Where, road lead you to the right path and where solitude is not considered to be a sign of inappropriateness. It is not only respected but lived, loved and worked upon.
Anne (Lotte Verbeek) is a widower. Not once is her past life showed to us, which masterfully lets us into a life that in spite of looking lonesome, somehow feels truer than reality. She chooses to leave everything behind and take the high-road. She hitch-hikes to reach a patch of land by the calm, serene countryside where she wishes to work on herself. She wishes to live a life in solitary and hence chances upon everything that can bring her guard down. A series of sequences shows us just how concerned she is with the life of others. She gets overly dramatic over a perverted fantasy of someone who gives her a lift and acts stubborn towards a woman who asks her about needing her help.
Anne meets Martin (Stephen Rae) who owns a piece of land where she finally reaches through thick and thin. Martin considers solitude to be the supreme luxury of life where he has left all the conventions of civilizations and dedicated his life to hand-based work and gaining all the wisdom in the world that he couldn’t when he was not on his own. Throughout the course of the film we see these two entities who are quite similar to each other form a terrific relationship with each other.
The people who choose to live a life of solitude wish to spend their time with themselves. But even in their comforting pace of silence and their lonely walks, they don’t cancel out their yearning to have a connection with another soul. A soul that is not a mere impulse but a part of the first soul in more ways than one. Urszula Antoniak’s film explores a life of two individuals tied together in a very simplistic knot of quietude. They have their own personal space and their own personal choices. While he sits on the bar when they go out. She gets overly drunk and just dances her heart out. But in their individuality, lies a very real, poignant and beautiful connection.
Nothing Personal is a remarkable film. It doesn’t over dramatizes anything and just wishes to convey a very articulate message about individuals. It speaks volumes under its richly powerful subtexts and never becomes overly sympathetic towards the two main characters. It also symbolically studies the tension between companionship and human tendency. Which only makes it all the more intriguing.
★★★★
