Slavic damsels in distress

Das Fraülein (The Young Woman) 2006 Switzerland (75 minutes), written and directed by Andrea Štaka.

This film, director Andrea Štaka’s first narrative feature, looks at life from the perspective of three very different women.

Each woman’s story is compelling, but the film is too refreshingly direct and emotionally honest either to be a ‘feel-good’ movie or a tearjerker.

Reža (Mirjana Karanović) is a Serb who immigrated to Zurich from Belgrade twenty-five years before the story begins. Disappointed in love, she resolved to make a successful, independent life for herself and never look back.

We first see her as an attractive but severe, restrained middle-aged woman who owns and runs a popular, well-run cafeteria and speaks only a correct German with her mostly male, Serbian- and Croatian-speaking staff. As several characters tell her, ‘If there’s one thing you’re good at, it’s counting.’

Mila (Ljubica Jović), a Croatian immigrant and the employee who has been with Reža the longest, seems satisfied to play a subordinate role to Reža similar to the one she plays to her husband Ante (Zdenko Jelčić). Ante is unable to work because he has an ‘injury.’ He stays at their apartment, obsessed with the house where they plan to retire, forever ‘under construction’ somewhere on the Adriatic coast that he and Mila once called home, though their family, their children and grandchildren, now are all in Zurich.

Reža and Mila confine themselves within each her own narrow vision of the possible, troubling to keep ‘the feeling when you think you’re thirsty and then you realize what you’re feeling is longing’ in a mental ‘tin’ where it can be counted and rest assured.

Ana Tanovic (Marija Škaričić), the ‘fraülein’ of the title, hitchhikes into the orderly women’s kingdom that the cafeteria represents.

Ana, in her early twenties, is a drifter, a homeless Bosnian from Sarajevo. She survived war and her brother’s suicide afterward but, we learn early in the film, knows that she critically needs hospitalization and a bone marrow donor. Her flight is a fanciful attempt to outrun what she otherwise knows to be inevitable; she does this in what looks like one long, confident stride at a time.

Ana is charismatic because she is young and attractive, self-assured and glows with fun. She also is scared out of her wits.

She ends up in the cafeteria for coffee on her first morning in Zurich, having partied and spent the night in a nearby industrial loft with artists she met on the street the night before. When she hears Croatian spoken and sees a need, she comes behind the counter and gets right to work. The rest of the story flows from this moment, a beautifully acted narrative well told in pictures, though the farmers shown polling trees before the title are a bit of a mystery.

Like the blues and many Irish airs, one gets the sense in this movie that the music and dancing these women do is a way of making the best out of each her own pain and disappointment—though each perhaps receives an intimation of fulfillment.

Economy-sized happiness

Happiness 2006 (11 minutes) written and directed by Sophie Barthes (distributed by Film Movement with the feature film Das Fraülein)

The unnamed protagonist (Elzbita Czyzewska) is an older woman who lives alone and works at a factory with other middle-aged women quality controlling condoms.

We see the women in long white laboratory coats and longer faces, in white hairnets and gloves, working silently in this sterile environment, filling condoms with water, stroking, kneading and massaging them, presumably to ensure that they do not leak. An alarm sounds when a condom leaks water, and a supervisor (Elizabeth Bennet), a broad beamed, middle-aged woman with large glasses and a disapproving square jaw appears with a clipboard.

The only thing that separates the supervisor from the other workers are the fancy white patent leather high heeled pumps she wears—with band aids on the backs of her heels.

One evening after work, the protagonist notices something in a Brighton Beach shop window and enters the shop to ask the shopkeeper (Lelyana Gashkova) to show it to her. It is a white box with a gold seal that says on three sides in Russian, in plain black Cyrillic letters: СЧАСТЬЕ (schast’ye—happiness).

The shopkeeper tells the protagonist that she must purchase the box to open it, and when the protagonist asks how long it lasts, the shopkeeper says: ‘Depends who use it. Can last years, or couple of seconds.’

The protagonist buys the box and has it gift-wrapped—‘It’s not for myself,’ she makes sure to tell the shopkeeper…