Paring down and running off

The young Austrian director Daniel Hoesl's debut feature Soldate Jeannette (or "Soldier Jane") has a lot going for it, though, alas, not quite enough, due mainly to shortcomings in the scenario department. One can't quarrel with the austere, elegant look throughout, the witty conceptual coolness, the nice use of wide aspect ratio by cinematographer Gerald Kerkletz, the cool urban interiors in the earlier sections, and then, when Fanni (Johanna Orsini-Rosenberg) runs away from her posh life, the soft images of a farm up in the hills and a luminous forest. It may be that Herr Hoesl, an eccentric dandy in dress, mistakes style for substance. The nose-thumbing eccentricity of his protagonist and her life-changing radicalism have caused Jeannette to be mentioned in the same breath with the rigorously strange films of Giorgos Lanthimos. But there isn't enough here. It's fun (and aesthetically pleasing) while it lasts; but that isn't long enough.

Fanni (is she Jeannette?) is a forty-something woman who belongs, from talk with female relatives, to a wealthy family, resides in a beautiful flat in Vienna she's lived in for twenty years. She buys chic designer frocks and frequents spas and martial arts classes. Something causes her to run off the rails, but unfortunately we don't know what. In fact we don't know how normal her behavior was in the past. All we know is that she buys a fancy dress and pops it in the trash on her way out. Agents come to inform her that due to her non-payment of rent for three months (isn't that rather extreme after twenty years?) she must sign an agreement and has a week to move her things out. She is only interested in serving them macha tea and getting to her martial arts class, too busy to sign anything. In a short time she is on her way to the country in a car she's taken on a test drive from a car dealer and not returned, carrying with her an impressive pile of cash she''s gotten from her bank, with which she stages an evening forest potlatch. Later she meets up with Anna (Christina Reichsthaler), a young woman working on a farm tending hogs. Anna brings her along and she's taken on at the farm, but both Anna and Fanni soon both become impatient with farm life, and anyway Fanni's various misdeeds are about to catch up with her if she stays.

Is it wrong to expect more than this from the writing than this outline? I've said the film is lovely to look at, and the nice package includes strong electronic music, the credits are set in a format that's very Bauhaus. James Greenberg of Hollywood Reporter describes this film as "an elliptical experiment more consumed with form and ideas than telling a comprehensible story" and that's one way of putting it. Hoesl delights in inserting little things like a scene of Fanni/Jeannette (before she flees) snoring loudly in an art house showing Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc. All the earlier sequences are sharp statements about the modern urban world's fetishizing of things; Fanni and Anna may be chooosing saintly denial of all that. But apart from these ideas, the story is really perfectly comprehensible; there just isn't enough to it. Hoesl's focus on matters other than "story" has led him to give us elegant imagery and a palpable physicality, but too little sense of an ending. Or not enough. Nonetheless there is great assurance here, and this is a first-timer who may yet give much pleasure.

Soldate Jeannette/Soldier Jane, 80 mins., debuted at Sundance January 2013 where it was nominated for a Grand Jury prize, also showed at Gothenberg and Rotterdam where it was nominated for the Tiger award. It was screened for this review as part of the FSLC-MoMA series, New Directors/New Films, in New York, March 2013.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.