Monday, November 28, 2016

United States of Love (2016) Making Waves 2016

Shot by Romanian New Wave cinematographer Oleg Mutu UNITED STATES OF LOVE won the Silver Bear for Screenplay at the last Berlin Film Festival. The film is four loosely connected stories about women and their unrequited loves.

Playing more like four separate films joined together UNITED STATES OF LOVE is a heavy look at love lust and longing. Its a film where we look at the quiet and not so quiet desperation of four women in a country opening to the west (it's set in 1990ish) and going capitalistic. One woman lusts for a new priest. Another is having an affair with a married doctor. A third forms an attachment for a young woman. The fourth finds the downside of striving to be a model in a free economy.

Nicely acted by everyone concerned, this is a very good look at a world and lives in change. We have develop a real feeling for the women and their plight, though the obsession for the objects of their desire shown by some of them is more than a tad creepy. Logic and reason kind of get tossed aside by it but at the same time director Tomasz Wasilewski is juggling a lot of balls in the air making comments not only on the lives of the women but society in general.

I liked it a great deal.

United States of Love plays Friday at Making Waves New Romanian Film Festival. For more information and tickets go here

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