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BERLINALE 2014 Forum

Berlinale: Daughters, two lives in the void

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- This German film presented at the Forum in Berlin conveys with all due restraint the indescribable suffering caused by the loss of a child or a mother's lack of love

Berlinale: Daughters, two lives in the void

In Daughters [+see also:
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, her third fiction feature, selected for the Berlinale in the Forum section, Maria Speth calmly addressesthe very sensitive subject of the harm that can be caused by a mother's lack of love and the sadness of a failed mother-daughter relationship. She does so in a way which is undoubtedly the best, ie. never expressing it in words, but rather conveying it through an impression of emptiness. From the first images – a homeless young girl lying on a slope near the road, ranting and raving all alone in the mist, a blond woman alone in an airport who seems totally disorientated, a morgue where the corpse of a young girl lies dissected on the slab –, we are struck by the pervasive coldness of the film.

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The approach adopted by Speth, all silence and solitary interiorized pain, will no doubt deeply affect spectators who relate personally to the subject. Others will certainly appreciate her delicacy and sense of propriety.

The story revolves around the relationship that develops between Agnes, a smartly dressed teacher of literature who has been asked to come to Berlin to identify the body of a young unknown runaway and who decides to stay on to see whether her daughter is in the same situation of peril and precariousness, and Ines, a young vagrant artist, dirty and uncouth, who turns up under the wheels of Agnes's car while the latter wanders through the capital, staring at all the young female silhouettes, seeing only them. They don't like each other, and don't really communicate, but as their parallel paths have crossed (Agnes feels obliged to accommodate Ines in her hotel room and feed her; Ines inspects Agnes's luggage and borrows some of her clothes), they manage to surprise each other, and occasionally touch on sensitive and intimate feelings, revealing a few astonishing points in common, and arousing keen awareness on the part of Agnes that Ines is also someone's daughter.

Even so, we are neither reassured nor comforted. Throughout the film, the director remains true to the development of her original intention. This decision gives rise to deeply melancholic and very beautiful scenes – like the one in which the mother touches her own face, imagining that it is her daughter's, or the one in which Ines's clay-covered body (often naked in the film) slowly detaches itself from a moving fresco composed of parts of young women, either alive or statues –, but the coldness is implacably maintained. When the paths of the mother, cut off from her child, and the abandoned young girl set off again in different directions, they immediately slip back into anonymity, becoming once more just two lonely silhouettes in the crowd. 

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(Translated from French)

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