When Austrian director Adrian Goiginger, whose internationally best-known film remains his 2017 feature debut, The Best of All Worlds [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
fiche film], which was followed by a couple of local box-office hits, read Barbara Pachl-Eberhart’s tragic bestselling autobiographical novel Vier minus drei, he teamed up with Bosnian-born, Vienna-based screenwriter Senad Halilbašić for his fifth feature, Four Minus Three, which has world-premiered in the Berlinale’s Panorama. The result is a devastating drama on loss, grief and letting go.

Valerie Pachner, from Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
fiche film] and the Kingsman [+lire aussi :
bande-annonce
fiche film] franchise, plays Barbara, a wannabe actress-turned-clown, married to another clown, Heli (Robert Stadlober, last seen in Andrea Gets a Divorce [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
fiche film]). When their yellow clown van, a wedding gift, gets hit by a train, it’s Heli who’s behind the wheel, with their two kids, young boy Thimo and toddler daughter Fani, in the back. Heli is killed on the spot, Thimo is technically alive but will never wake up, while there seems to be hope for the girl, the doctor says. Barbara clings to this as a promise, which it never was, leaving a mark that will make acceptance much harder and threatening her mental health.

We watch her desperate, completely natural but equally futile attempts to escape grief and fill the void, in parallel with flashbacks showing us how she met Heli and became a clown under his guidance, how they fixed up a dilapidated house in Graz that he inherited from his aunt, and how they fought about their art and the precarious nature of their work. Heli’s parents, especially the God-fearing mother, take over the funeral preparations while Barbara is numb with shock, but she surprises them by bringing a clown troupe to celebrate her family’s lives. This surreal, powerful scene will stay with many viewers. When her close friends introduce her to TV actor Friedrich (Hanno Kofler), after much misunderstanding and pain, she finally glimpses the path towards letting go.

Most of the time, Goiginger and Halilbašić successfully navigate the minefield of sentimentality, especially thanks to Pachner. Being a clown, as Heli explains, means creating one character that will constantly grow, informed by one’s whole life. She comes up with Heidi Appelzeller, and even non-German speakers will recognise the particular Swiss accent. Pachner delivers a multi-layered performance comprising the Barbara who met Heli, the one who flourished with him and their kids and lost them, and the one that struggles to pull herself out of the depths of despair. Heli’s remark is a clear nod towards how she will find the way, but it doesn’t steal anything away from the film’s drama. Rather, it effectively prepares the ground for the final, soaring scene.

With such emotional material, the difficult part is not going over the top. So DoP Paul Sprinz films in a classical, controlled way, with the image in the flashbacks differing just by being very lightly yellow-hued. Editors Simon Blasi and Martin Pfeil bridge the transitions between the timelines via Marvin H Keil’s moderately impressionistic sound design, although Arash Safaian’s stripped-down piano-and-strings score was perhaps not strictly necessary, even sparsely used as it is. 

Four Minus Three is a co-production between Germany’s Giganten Film Produktions and Austria’s 2010 Entertainment. Beta Cinema has the international rights.