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Tuesday, 15 August 2006 01:09 |
The simple plot revolves around a young wife and mother, Anna (Maria Kraakman), who periodically travels from her Dutch home to work as an irrigation specialist in such far-flung locales as Egypt. Anna's home life seems idyllic, as evidenced by the repeated scenes of lovemaking with her husband Sebastian (Fedja van Huet) and bathing with her infant son.
But that carefully ordered life enters a state of disarray when she discovers the body of a female co-worker who has hanged herself. The dead woman's husband claims to have no explanation for his wife's suicide, insisting that their marriage was a happy one.
Soon, Anna begins questioning the underlying state of her own existence, even beginning to follow her husband around looking for evidence of an affair. Fueling her paranoia is the fact that before they were married, he was the lover of her older sister.
Director-screenwriter Nanouk Leopold is much more interested in mood and visual style than on a coherent narrative, with the result that her effort often has the feel of the European art films of the early 1960s. But while "Guernsey" lacks the intellectual rigor and stylistic imagination of its inspirations, it does possess a certain minimalist power, with its elegant widescreen compositions and bare-bones dialogue infusing the proceedings with an ominously chilly atmosphere.
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