Summer '04.

"Stefan Krohmer's Summer '04 is a masterful and original thriller that matches Rohmer's vacationing plots with the paranoid and anxious underpinnings of Polanski, coming together in a noir-tinged story of desire, infidelity, responsibility — and, of course, moral ambiguity," writes Cullen Gallagher in the L Magazine.

"As much a bulls-eyed survey of contemporary German attitudes toward youth, aging, sex, and class as a classic psychological thriller set against a deceptively serene summer idyll, Summer '04 walks a fine line between compelling and camp," writes Michelle Orange in the Voice. "What keeps director Stefan Krohmer's second film (the follow-up to 2003's They've Got Knut) from crossing into the realm of high melodrama are the deeply, delicately drawn performances of his five-person cast."

Updated through 8/3.

"Summer '04 will surely be compared to the films of Claude Chabrol as its slow, insidious machinations build to a cynical ending implicating false bourgeois propriety, but it's also more than that," writes Michael Joshua Rowin at indieWIRE. "There's something haunting and - to use a word no longer in fashion - existential in Krohmer's patient, unrushed delivery, in his ability to trust his soundtrack-less images and create lived-in conditions for understated, complex performances. Summer '04 is as real as life... And like life, Summer '04 provides no implicit judgment or fail-safe reassurance in response to the unsettling confusion of its characters, who must deal with reality very much on their own."

"Summer '04 is so plainly the product of meticulous forethought that the shooting script might have been etched on marble slab," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times. "Unfortunately, the result is a slower, more somber entry in the Sick Soul of the Bourgeoisie genre - an overcrowded, overly familiar category, typified in the United States by American Beauty and Little Children, in which the spiritually comatose reconnect with life by having affairs and suffering. If it weren't for Mr Krohmer's superminimalist direction, the movie's shortcomings might be more apparent."

"There may be something formulaic or deterministic about the film's ultimate direction, but along the way it's quite a ride," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "Martina Gedeck is tremendous as Mirjam, the unself-consciously sexy, 40ish wife and mom who doesn't even realize she wants more than she's getting from family life. (For about the 755th time, I will observe that American films pretty much never offer middle-aged women these kinds of roles.)"

"Summer '04 couldn't have come soon enough," writes Ed Gonzalez at Slant. "Philip Lopate, writing for Film Comment, rightfully praised Gedeck's performance for its graduations of feeling as her character 'goes from being uptight mother hen to the captive of her libido without our ever questioning her consistency.' The reason we don't is because her behavior is consistent with that of anyone who has come to the realization that the question of morality, not just as it pertains to sex, is not so easily classified as black and white. The film leaves you wondering what could possibly happen in the summer of '05."

Update, 8/3: "While Krohmer's forbiddingly precise direction and the cast's nastily impassioned performances recall Bergman at his finest, Daniel Nocke's script, a literate wonder for most of the film's running time, concludes with a staggeringly misguided epilogue that effectively flushes ninety minutes' worth of painstaking behavioral nuance right down the toilet," writes Mike D'Angelo at Nerve. "It's a heartbreaking act of self-sabotage that almost ruins - but doesn't quite - this otherwise superlative picture."

Posted by dwhudson at August 2, 2007 2:11 PM