Working my way in no logical order through the films of the under-rated Urszula Antoniak, I come to her first feature, 2009’s Nothing Personal. And it’s nearly all here – the female focus, the quiet way of working, the absence of unnecessary detail, mood rather than plot being her primary concern, and great performances just to top it all off.
What isn’t quite here is Antoniak’s sudden ta-daa moment, the moment in Code Blue (2011) or Magic Mountains (2020) when she suddenly racks all the knobs to the max, to shocking effect. It could be, of course, that those films are atypical. There are another three films, at the time of writing, to explore (Nude Area, Beyond Words and Splendid Isolation) and maybe they’ll reveal that ta-daa is the exception not the rule.
That’s not to say there isn’t a sudden change of gear, a reveal, a magic moment, in Nothing Personal. There is. But it’s handled without fanfare. Perhaps because it’s shocking enough in itself not to warrant one.
Plot details need to now follow: a young woman evidently at the end of a relationship – ring being discarded, belongings dumped outside on the Amsterdam street where she lives – heads off to Ireland on her own, with tent, backpack and no money.
She’s hitch-hiking to get away from it all, is the surmise. Fragile, brittle, foraging in bins for food, she’s short with people she meets, giving a family of picnickers who are being vaguely helpful a rude response, and reacting violently – you could say hysterically – when a man giving her a lift makes a move towards his groin, perhaps innocently, it’s uncertain.
Anyway, few words having been spoken, she arrives pretty much as far west as you can go in Europe, at Connemara. Here, at the end of the world, perched on an outcrop of rock hard against the Atlantic, there is a solid white-painted house inhabited by a man who lives there all alone.
They meet and he doesn’t speak much, but then nor does she. He asks her for her name. She won’t tell him. She is almost feral in her defence of her space, like a wounded animal. He offers her work in the garden in exchange for food, which she eats outside, before returning to the tent she has pitched down the road. The next day more work in return for food, again eaten outside.
The man is a widower and lives a simple but splendid life – lobsters from the sea, vegetables from the garden, books on the shelves, music from the CD player, wine with dinner.
The man decides to call the new arrival “You” (it is in fact Anne, a glimpse at her driver’s licence later on reveals) and this seems to suit both of them. They make a deal, in fact, food-for-work, a transactional relationship pure and simple. Nothing personal, nothing at all.
What then plays out – of course it does – is one of those stories about two people who don’t get on until they do. Antoniak’s telling of the story is what makes it special. It’s a “soft” film, in the same sense that the Irish use the word to describe a day the rest of us would probably describe as wet but isn’t the same thing at all. Gentle, gauzy, muted, the colours of Anne’s clothes and hair matching the scenery of peat bogs, bracken and sky, with Antoniak’s decision to shoot on grainy, hazy 16mm film, and DP Daniël Bouquet’s flat colour palette making the fit even tighter. It helps that Lotte Verbeek is both beautiful and fascinating to watch, and that she’s adept at micro-acting. The small gesture counts for everything in this film, essentially a two-hander with both actors playing people who are as good as psychologically absent, elsewhere.
Against her as the older Martin – “old man” she calls him, contemptuously, defensively at first – Stephen Rea, who’s gallant in the support role to Verbeek’s star turn.
It’s a gorgeous and sad film, bleakly beautiful, and lean (only 85 minutes long) as Antoniak’s films tend to be. Hopeful, too, but not gushingly so. What a debut.
Nothing Personal – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
