Bird's Eye View

The Heart is a Dark Forest – reviewed by Sophie Ivan

Think you’ve had your fill of tortured women running into the woods to tear their hair out after watching Ms Winslet in Revolutionary Road? Well, think again. The heart may be a dark forest, but it’s a veritable thrill to take a wander through it.

Nicolette Krebitz’s second feature is a slice of pop surrealism centring on a woman’s psychosexual meltdown – which sounds like a trial, and by rights should be depressing, but I actually found it a joy to watch.

Maybe that means I could do with a lie-down on the psychiatrist’s couch, or maybe it has something to do with the fact that Krebitz’s film provides a much needed breath of fresh air.  The premise is pretty straightforward: what would you do if you found out your husband, and the father of your children, was leading a double life with another wife and kids, while you were at home changing nappies like a total mug? So far, so sadly-not-that-surreal.

But it’s where Krebitz takes this story that is so exhilarating and unexpected, and the perspective that she brings to an age-old story that is so refreshing.  We follow Marie (Nina Hoss) through a heady 24 hours, which begin with a scene of dreary familiarity that is promptly turned on its head when she, by a Sliding Doors-type twist of fate, walks through the door into her husband Thomas’ (Devid Streisow) Kafkaesque double life. Needless to say, from that point on, things are never quite the same again.

What follows is an extremely pacy unfurling of Marie’s emotions, brimful of stylishly channelled literary and cinematic references – there’s a masquerade ball in a castle which locates us somewhere between Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Story and Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of that novella, Eyes Wide Shut; an after-party moment which sees the deglamorized revellers trudging through the dark forest at dawn-break, a nod to the queasy final reel of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita; flashbacks in which Nicole plays out her memories with Thomas on a sparse Brechtian stage; TV footage of Maria Callas performing Cherubini’s Medea, the archetypal woman spurned; and a moment featuring a terrifying miniature Jesus who hops off his cross and hotfoots it off the screen, which is pure Lynch.

But you know what? Those artists are all fellas. What Krebitz’s script does is train a woman’s eye on a story and a surrealist style that we’re used to watching through a male lens, and the result is liberating. Call it cinematic cross-dressing, if you will. If you’ve never tried it before, you really should.

The Heart is a Dark Forest screens at the Birds Eye View film festival on Friday March 6th at 6.15pm and Saturday March 7th at 8.30pm, both at the ICA. Director Nicolette Krebitz will be with us for a Q&A hosted by Larushka Ivan Zadeh (The Metro).

Sophie Ivan worked for Birds Eye View for the 2008 film festival, and now writes for Little White Lies and Screen International.