1 week Ago By Subhash K Jha
Isabel Coixet’s Spanish-language treatise on kneejerk feminism, Un Amor, is a hard nut to crack. We are neither with the film’s insistently huffish, isolated heroine Nat (Laia Costa) nor are we completed distanced from her. Nat, played with startling directness by Laia Costa, almost as if she doesn’t know of the camera’s existence, is a bit of an enigma.
She first arrives in a Spanish village where everyone knows what the others are doing. Soon, the narration feels like D. H.
Lawrence on a dreamy day. Several men hover around Nat, checking her out, sniffing, absorbing, and observing, looking for the obvious. The sexual aggression of the men borders on rape.
They all but jump on Nat, and her landlord (Luis Bermejo) at one point actually tries to rape her. On the other hand, there is her neighbour, a calm, polite, gentle, and amiable soul named Peter (Hugo Silva), who makes an effort to portray himself as a thorough gentleman. Nat is polite to Peter.
But it is the third man, mysteriously known in the village as the German Andreas (Hovik Keuchkerian), who offers to repair Nat’s leaky roof and demands sex in return. The leaky roof is a significant detail. For, Nat is more damaged than her roof.
From a breezy, or perhaps windy, glimpse at a life assailed by male attention, Un Amor turns into a dark, stormy drama about obsession and damnation. Nat’s one-night stand with the flabby aging repairman turns into a prolonged embarrassing infatuation that threatens to sink her self-esteem into the lowest possible abyss of self-abnegation. Un Amor is not an easy film to watch.
Its welters of intimacy, the opposite of amorous, are not executed as an aesthetic experience. It is more like watching someone from a peeping hole in the bathroom. Love is not always a splendid thing.
Neither sex. Un Amor rips open the romance and mystique of human relationships to expose the depravity within. There comes a point in the awkward relationship where Nat is on the floor pleading, whining, and begging for attention from Andreas, who is as attractive as a polar bear.
In Un Amor, director Isabel Coixet and her leading lady Laia Costa offer a no-filter look at an ostensibly independent woman’s free-fall tumble into subjugation, precipitated not so much by the men around her as by the inner chains that bind her to her appetites. Costa is, how to put it, the opposite of seductive and yet no less captivating for it. She shines in her dimmed self-projection.
The wild, unkempt green outdoors match the heroine’s temperament. Get Latest News Live on Times Now along with Breaking News and Top Headlines from Hollywood, Entertainment News and around the world..
