Venice. Fallen.

"Nine years after Nordrand (Northern Skirts), which won actress Nina Proll the Marcello Mastroianni Award, Viennese filmmaker Barbara Albert returns to the Venice Film Festival with Fallen (Falling)," announces Boyd van Hoeij at europeanfilms.net. This new one follows five women who haven't seen each other in 14 years for 36 hours. "'There is a small shock in bridging those 14 years,' explained the director in Venice, 'And this shock allows the characters to consciously evaluate what has become of them in those years.'"

"[W]ell-played, cleanly shot but spectacularly empty," writes Variety's Derek Elley. "Dawdling script has none of the rigor and metaphysical depths of her previous Northern Skirts and Free Radicals, and makes no case for spending time with such uninteresting characters."

The Hollywood Reporter's Ray Bennett: "It's all quite noisy, but there doesn't seem to be very much going on as the shared confidences and female bonding are not especially convincing."

But Cristina Nord, writing in die taz (and in German), is impressed. "Desires and disappointments, coincidences and plans, private and political concepts of good, right lives, striving and failing: Albert allows all these to flow into beautiful sketches of womens' designs for their lives." More praise from Jan Schulz-Ojala in Der Tagesspiegel.

"[A]miable, if slightly meandering," writes David Jenkins for Time Out, "heartfelt and thought-provoking stuff."

Posted by dwhudson at September 6, 2006 12:26 AM