Brownian Movement

Saturday this week was quite unlike other Saturdays. I attended a talk on Islamic worship, followed by a short photo shooting session at an adjoining park, a meal at an Indian restaurant and then, instead of the usual concert at the Cultural Centre, I saw a film from the land of windmills, tulips and Philips.

The film won the Golden Calf awards for the best director and the best screenplay at the 2011 Nederlands Film Festival. Directed by writer-director Nanouk Leopold and acted by Sandra Hüller( as Charlotte) and Dragan Bakema (as Max, her husband), the film, the fourth by Leopoldf, has a most peculiar title, Brownian Movement. A quick search at Wikipedia shows that Brownian motion, named after the Botanist Robert Brown who first discovered it,technically known as "pedesis", a Greek word meaning "leaping", is the "random drifting of particles suspended in a fluid (liquid or gas) or the mathematical model used to describe such movements, often called a particle theory" e.g stock market fluctuations due to unrepeatable and unforeseen events.

As the film opens, we are shown a room fitted with the barest of furniture, predominantly in white : a bed, a one-seater sofa in soft fabric and a wooden chair and a small wooden table. Everything is contained by long straight lines and rectangles. There is an enormous bed. We are shown Charlotte looking around. Off screen, we hear a voice telling her what is included in the rent and where the bathroom is. Charlotte looks at everything, in silence, her face calm. At the end of the inspection, she takes the room. We see several tens of 100 dollar Euros changing hands as deposit.. Charlotte did not say a single word throughout the entire episode except to answer a question that she came from Germany. In the background, we hear the sound of someone breathing heavily. We see her carefully laying down a grey blanket of her own, lie down on its enjoying its texture. She takes a bath, her white towel wrapped around her. She holds on to her towel, which she presses very close to her body, apparently enjoying the tightness of being caressed by its innumerable soft threads. Next we are shown one after another men enter the room, looking at each other, disrobe, make love in various positions and then leave,. But we never hear a word exchanged between them. Some of such lovers are young, some older, some thin, some hairy, some obese, some rough, some gentler. However, we are seldom shown their faces, only the backs of their bodies and those parts of their torso involved in sexual activities.

Next we are shown Max and Charlotte making love in their domestic bed, also in silence, the only sound we hear is the sound of their heavy breath. We learn later that they are husband and wife, Max, an architect and Charlotte, a lady German doctor engaged in research on in a Brussels hospital, apparently happily married with a child of about 5 or 6 Benjamin (Ryan Brodie) . She tells a bedtime story to their son, about how the king and queen re-celebrated their marriage and lived happily ever after. Her son asked for a second one. She refused and left. 

In part 2 of the three part film, we see Charlotte attending the office of a psychiatrist. We see her struggling to answer some of the questions posed to her by in the psychiatirst clinically clean office. She said she only wanted to touch Max and say with regard to the other men,"I shouldn't tell it. It only makes it
worse.". She says, "I really don't know what I am supposed to feel.". Indeed how could she articulate and verbalize how she actually felt: she is simply a tactile, not a verbal animal. It is an episode in which she meets one of her previous string of lovers which she encounters in her bare apartment expressly set up for such sexual rendezvous, when out of a momentary impulse from the way the man, one of her patients, attempts to touch her, she hits him with such uncontrollable violence which leaves her with sore knuckles which triggers a medical inquiry which eventually leads to her being pronounced unfit to continue to practice medicine. Before the verdict was handed down, we see her visit an open field, lying down, feeling the ground, the grass around her, her eyes looking up at the sky, listening to the birds and sirens, rapt her own thoughts, apparently taking comfort in her closeness to the ground and feeling it viscerally with her skin. After the verdict was pronounced, we see her husband sitting by her side in the countryside, both rapt in thought. Again, silence. No words of comfort or any embrace.

In part three of the film, we see her in India or somewhere in some Middle Eastern country whither his husband had to go in connection with his work.They had three children by now. We see her playing with the children, sewing, helping with domestic work. Apparently her previous "unacceptable" behavior was no longer an issue. But we are shown shown her lying on rough concrete
surface of the roof of the unfinished building, looking up at the sky, in an unfinished building by the side of the river, apparently in a reverie.  She must feel close to the ground, which is her true home. Next we see her go to one of her husband's work site, a tall and
imposing building on construction. From the ground, we see her husband
observing her talking to one of the men working there on a staircase
landing through an opening without windows. We see her husband crying
during the night. Next we see her all nude, begging to be let inside the
room during the night. Then we are shown her husband observing her from a distance sitting down
at a dark corner of the unfinished building, a shawl around her,
enjoying the roughness of the concrete, wrapped in her own thoughts. The film ends as we see her and her husband take a trip, the yellow of the grasslands passing rapidly from screen left to screen right.

I do not know what Leopold was trying to say in this film. I suspect that he might be trying to explore coldly, and objectively the mystery of human sexual desire, something as real as our breathing, the silent inexplicable urges we feel for sexual union with a member of the opposite sex, as unpredictable and as natural as brownian motion of particles in liquid. Words fail at such a level. No words are ever adequate to describe the actual movement of our sexual desire, when, where and how and why. They cannot be imprisoned by words, nor by conventional social and religious morality. He shows it by pure images, ably done by photographer Frank van den Eeden through a very formal structure of squares and rectangles in three parts, reproduced by the static almost still shots without panning, without camera movement which seem to mimick the structure of the prison of mainstream rational control of what is basically an emanation of the animality lying at the core of human civilization. He shows by the closeness which the heroine feels with Nature, with all it roughness, uncouthness and her need to touch everything with her skin in her environment and her ability to communicate only with children and to be "in tune" with them and their innocence.  A most unusual film shot with a minimalist style, without any conventional plot line, without any dialogue to speak of, with very sparing use of music but no less powerful for all that and perhaps because of such lack. Under the the almost static scenes, we can feel the powerful currents of Charlotte's unarticulable emotions and her urges and her instinctual needs to be in physical contact, expressed most eloquently by her facial expressions and body gestures.  This is definitely not a film for the squeamish or your regular Sunday churchgoer.

Sandra Huller is excellent as Charlotte. She conveys her utter inability to understand or rather her indifference to how the world might judge her. She must remain faithful to herself, to who she really is, whether the world accepts her or not. Fortunately, she got a husband who did. We can wish her the happiness of the bedtime story she told her son Benjamin.