Ian Deltehy’s film “The Desire”

IIn the rectum in Swabia not far from Hebibron. Pastor’s wife Leena cooks breakfast for her husband. She slices the sausage sandwich for him, gives him a cheese sandwich when he leaves, helps with his coat and hands him a leather bag. A village girl is murdered, and the pastor is busy. But the scrap-ripened old opal that he drives must also be taken care of. Leena oversees the mechanic’s work, which is completely different than that of her squat husband, with dark, pale, soft, enigmatic features. Later, at the dead girl’s feast, he sees her sitting under a tree outside the inn and he takes her to his house. And this is how it all starts.

If this film comes from France, a fanatic would be surprised at a small piece of cinema, perhaps, a story in the tradition of Bernanos and Maurice Pilate. But because he comes from Germany, his sadness, his infertility, his silence, missing explanations, harsh attitudes, were the first complaints about sparse music. That was two years ago when “The Desire” won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival, the first in a series of festival and industry awards for German films that won Fatah Akin’s “Against the Berlin” in February. The Wall ”was crowned.

What did the film get for Leopard? Perhaps one gets closer to the secret of the award, when an actress talks about Susan-Marie Reggae, who accepts Leena’s legacy, and at the same time closes her cool, beautiful face, which is her body. Ki’s alert humility seems to be hidden from afar. One who is presenting himself, until he begins to deny himself the demands of his surroundings and give in to his own impulses. There is a scene in “The Desire” in which Leena prods in front of the car mechanic, her boyfriend, to try on a costume she gave him, and the way Susan-Marie plays it is actually still yours Have never seen – this hesitation, complete defenselessness before one’s own risk; Then the shock with which the shame is dispelled and the convention breaks down; Finally, the shining pride of a woman who has nothing but her aged body, already marked by time to express her desire, who was so late and unexpectedly awakened. It is about everything in “The Desire”, about life and death from the very first moment, and if at the end blood flows and a person dies in the pastor’s kitchen, its “criminal scene” balanced Has nothing to do with the criminal trade balance. It is an act that is at the behest of the world, for the village and its inhabitants, for marriage and its instinct, for the clergy and its hypocrisy. The answer from the outside world will not be long to come, but for the moment, the longest moment of this film, Leena has all the great heroines of the cinema, goddesses, avengers, queens of the night.

Director Ian Dillhey immigrated to Germany from Scotland, where he studied chemistry and pharmacy before moving to the Ludwigsburg Film Academy. His thesis in Ludwigsburg, “The Desire”, is also the end of a trilogy, beginning with the medium-length films “Summer on Horlchen” (1999) and “I’ll Take You On My Hands” (2000). It was also about women who are struggling for their happiness and falling into disaster, shaking the harbors of the circumstances in which each and every one is trapped. Dalthey said in Locarno that his films were “slow progress”. You can already tell from the formulation that he lacks confidence. Dalthey knows exactly what he is doing, and this knowledge speaks from every shot of his film, which is only the beginning of a cinema in its outer form, but a master’s work in its internal logic and accuracy.