contemporary world cinema for salmon arm |
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Moscow, Belgium (Aanrijding in Moscou)
Country:
Belgium
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Moscow, Belgium is as wonderfully contradictory as its title. A realistic romantic comedy with considerable raffish charm, it looks at love's struggles with an offbeat eye. The title is the name of a neighbourhood in the Belgian city of Ghent, where the film is set. The film deals candidly with where loves comes from and where it goes. The film opens with Matty (Barbara Sarafian) walking down the aisle of her local supermarket with a face that couldn't be bleaker. At age 41, she and her three children have been abandoned by her art teacher husband, Werner (Johan Heldenbergh) who's gone off to live with a 22-year-old former student. Leaving the supermarket parking space, she collides with a huge truck driven by the red-haired, red-bearded Johnny (Jurgen Delnaet). But the crash itself is nothing compared to the verbal collision that comes next. Johnny is a man two years sober and eager to discover himself. He is ready to love a woman, and won't be put off by Matty's attitude, demeanour, and all her frustrations. And then it turns out that the ex-husband, and love of her life, is still very much in the picture. Johnny also soon turns out to be a complex individual with a past. In the end Matty has to choose between taking a chance on an imperfect man or trying to mend a broken marriage. In his impressive debut film, Director Christophe van Rompaey draws us deeply into the lives of these characters and underscores that choices in love are rarely clean and easy. "In this charmer of a movie, love is like the 10-ton truck driven by one of the unlikely sweethearts. It hits—and it hits hard.” K Turan, calendarlive.com |
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