TIFF Review: MY MOTHER, MY BRIDE AND I

Posted by Todd Brown at 9:25am.

Posted in Film & DVD Reviews , Drama, Continental Europe & Russia, Toronto Film Festival 2008.

Ignore the fact that this premise in Hollywood hands would inevitable result in mawkish sentimentality and bad slapstick. Ignore also the bad title, which has virtually no relationship to the film’s original moniker. Hans Steinbichler’s Der Zweite Frau is as impeccably crafted and beautifully performed a piece of work as you’ll see among the three hundred or so titles in this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, a finely wrought bit of work that impresses on all levels.

Erwin loves fish. He loves how they look, He loves that they don’t require anything of him other than a daily feeding. He has a giant fish poster on the wall of his bed room; a giant aquarium dominates the space. Erwin is a quiet, nervous sort who doesn’t get on well with most people. Erwin is also pushing forty, lives alone with his mother and terribly lonely. The solution? Travel to Romania to meet prospective brides. Irina, his eventual selection, is everything Erwin is not. Young, beautiful, educated, confident, the only obvious problem in Irina’s life is that she wants desperately to get out of Romania and make a better life for herself. They seem a perfect match ... there’s only the matter of Erwin’s mother.

Now, speaking as the son of a German immigrant who has spent virtually her entire life in easy walking distance of her three sisters, mother and grandmother, I can say with a certain amount of authority that German women are imposing sorts. They are strong willed, prone to feeding the people they like and fierce enemies for those they don’t. Erwin’s mother fits all of the above categories and while she loves her son and wants what is best for him she is distrustful of this stranger in her house and resents, to a degree, no longer being the sole object of her son’s affection.

And so the film goes, as a deceptively simple play on the dynamics between these three very different people. In Hollywood hands this would be some disastrous rom-com but Germany is a long way from Hollywood and Steinbichler is no Richard Curtis wannabe. Steinbichler resists the urge for comedy, instead treating all of his characters as real people with real needs, people fraught with fragility and a legitimate need to be loved. The core trio are astoundingly detailed, each of them played with nuance and subtlety as they make their way through a script that manages to feel both true to life while also managing to surprise and delight from start to finish with surprising little flourishes and a refusal to play to easy expectations. The relationship that builds between Erwin and Irina - played brilliantly by Matthias Brandt and Maria Popistasu - is absolutely believable from start to finish, which is no easy feat.

Die Zweite Frau is a beautiful, heartfelt, sincere piece of work. Beautifully shot with a stellar cast, a impressively nuanced script and a confident hand behind the camera this is not just a good film, it is a great one and very highly recommended.