E-Mail This Article to a Friend ANTARES

GERMAN | 105 MINUTES | MFA: AUGUST 11-14 + 19

Viennese writer/director Götz Spielmann’s angst-filled melodrama starts with a bang as a speeding car plows into a taxi. The camera then moves on to an explicit bang of another sort, as the cab’s passenger (Andreas Patton) screws Eva (Petra Morze), a Denueve-ian nurse in a listless marriage. Eva resides in a bleak apartment block that’s also home to other characters, and their lives collide for obvious symbolism. The sulky cashier who rings up Eva’s groceries feigns pregnancy to trap her lover; he later figures into a triangle involving a sadistic realtor. Without the nimbly executed jigsaw narrative (the stories unfold in sequence but occur at the same time), these depressives would surely bore. The shock of an erect cock might distract you from Eva’s drab plight, but nothing can prop up the limp observations about love, duplicity, and voyeurism. Antares survives on the impulse to gawk: these relationships are so mangled, it’s hard not to look.