The Small Back Room

The review was originally published on BERLIN FILM JOURNAL site. "I used to go to the porn stores and sex shops in Time Square. There were only men in these stores. I wanted to go where other women didn’t go. I wanted to invade male space, like the Fulton Fish Market, Yankee Stadium, Wall Street. I wanted to look back at them looking at me. In one store, there were magazines and sex booths in the back. After putting 25 cents in a machine behind the curtain and checking out the three minute peep show, I stopped to look at some magazines. The owner of the store asked me to leave. “Why should I? “He said I was making men nervous. And he wondered if I was trying to proposition the guys. It was okay for a woman to be an image in a magazine or on a screen, but a real woman in their space was too disruptive.” The quote is taken from an interview which director Bette Gordon gave for Talkhouse about her cult film, Variety from 1983, set in downtown New York City, in the center of fina...

In A Hidden Life, director Terence Malick’s ninth feature film once again presents a couple closely tied to nature and torn by the darkness brought by the humans upon it. Reaching all the way back to his first feature, the 1973 lyrical Badlands, loosely based on the Charles Starkweather killings, once again his inspiration is a true story of a couple set in a past decade where things seem simpler, and yet more starkly beautiful and deadly. Nature plays an important role, and it is the way in which Malick handles these two competing forces of the couple’s fleeting humanity – the eternal and the fragile, that form the crux of the film. The spiritual presence is where Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl) has no principal doubts. He is an utterly faithful and devoted Christian. We see him as a husband to his wife Fanny (Valerie Pachner) and father to his three girls, a caring son to his old single mother (having lost his father in the previous war) and loyal Burger, farmer, a caring friend. F...