14/02/2012

What is love, second feature film by Vienna’s Ruth Mader after Struggle in 2003, was screened at the Berlinale in the Forum section.

The documentary looks to the various meanings of the word love in modern day Austria, in a collage of five short episodes which range from the themes of solitude to marriage and family.

The different ways to understand the word love, summed up in the question (but without question mark) of the title, become a wider reflection on life in the 21st century in a Western country.

The sense of the scene and story being a fictitious construction is one of the film’s strong points and it is born from a careful and almost entomological examination of the characters’ daily habits.

An eye specialist who is single is waiting for a family lunch and playing with her new-born nephew, a couple is discussing the husband’s absences and their progressive distancing from each other, a priest tries to bring new people into his parish, a factory-worker leads her life going from factory shifts to housework, a husband and wife try to find a meeting point using couple therapy.

The story, while alienating and with moments of absurd humour, does not lack a certain underlying disquiet, underlined by the many scenes of life in nature (the home garden, the river or the woods) and interspersed by long sequences of daily activity – the worker chopping wood or the housewife doing the cleaning.

The result is a fresco on the existence of normal people captured in their most intimate moments – love, in fact, and family life – observed from a distance and with extreme care with regards to form. The images – which are static for the most part – are almost photographic, clean and rigorous, with a cold and notably elegant palette of colours.

What is love is produced by KGP Kranzelbinder Gabriele Production and funded by Austrian Film Institute, ORF, FISA, Film Fund Vienna, Land Niederösterreich, Cinestyria.

(Translated from Italian)