[CRITICAL] A SWEET WOMAN

Why a woman sees reship the package sent to her husband ? This is the question asked by A SWEET WOMAN, a road movie particular in Russia, the abandonment.

Sergei Loznitsa invites us to a funny trip. That of a woman almost silent, embarking on a journey in the Russian areas to find her husband, imprisoned, and which she has no new. We think boarding a ship for a pure road-movie making us go through a panel of decorations representative of the state of Russia. That certainely ! It is found in a movie bloated, cooped, made up of passages from one room to another, resigned myself to confront a minor contribution to the outside. And when the camera comes out, the plans remain to be clogged, be congested. Like this moment when the prostitute enters the villa and the large portal closes in front of us, we suddenly. The proposal is confusing, poisonous. It is a Russia in the form of prison total that we present Loznitsa. The first plan, airy, on a field, is a decoy. An ideal of life which can only be upset. Thus on the bases kafkaesque (the heroine is confronted with the stupidity, and hostile to the bureaucracy), A SWEET WOMAN drift to scenes any longer than the others, where people are talking about in the interior.Featuring a people abandoned by the institutions, trying to relate to its folklore (it sings, it drunk) to exist, Loznitsa deploys with heaviness of its ideas, as far as his mise en scene is imposing to us is stunning. The whole is not devoid of meaning, and is even clever in its development… Yet the film suffers from a pace catastrophic (2.20), rambling on his speech and, to close all, where nobody had understood it, book a last half-hour of heaviness, breath-taking, spoiling all the beautiful range of dream of his narrative in a scene of a meal completely failed – not to say annoying. Talkative, A SWEET WOMAN gliding dangerously close to the caricature of a Russian film as solemn as closed in on his demonstration. When the last shot comes, we can’t help but have a smile on his lips before the fall into the abyss involuntary caused by this assembly of people sleeping. Anesthesia soft, no doubt.

Maxime Bedini