re:mote voices

Title: Lovers
Cast: Élodie Bouchez, Sergej Trifunovic
Director: Jean-Marc Barr

Lovers is one of the early Dogme films, the fifth if memory serves. And, no doubt, one of the first following the Danish school of filmmaking to have been made outside Denmark.

The film is one of those narrow focus narratives, which closely follows events in a relationship of a couple to the exclusion of just about everything else. Dragan (Trifunovic) is a curious and perhaps bumbling man. He turns up at a bookshop in Paris one day. Where he meets Jeanne, a girl who works there, and decides to ask him out for a drink. Before long the two are having a relationship, which becomes increasingly intense, even if it is a tumultuous one.

Dragan is an artist. Prone to erratic behaviour. From obsessive working. To going off on wandering tangents. This is part of what makes the relationship an explosive one. But the fact that Dragan is also an illegal immigrant is the really big problem.

With this revelation we get the introduction of a different tension. A paranoia. The characters know fear, looking over their shoulders all the time. waiting for the police to arrive on their door step.

Films with this kind of focus on two people always create a strange effect. There is something disorientating about it. A separation from the rest of the world. Creating a certain void around the characters, which strips them of a level of context, which can make events harder to follow. In this case, that makes for quite a raw film. One which emphasizes the emotions at the core of Lovers - love and fear.