review from Globe and Mail

Lea (1996)

The Globe and Mail Review

Fine, timeless film makes every word and gesture count
By Rick Groen
Friday, March 26, 1999

Genre: Romance

Directed and written by Ivan Fila
Starring Lenka Vlasakova, Christian Redl, Hanna Schygulla
Classification: AA
Rating: ****

Beginning in abject brutality, Lea ends in haunting beauty, and the birth of one from the other is the miracle it celebrates. And what an extraordinary celebration this is. A remarkable first feature from the Czech-born, German-trained director Ivan Fila, the film has the awful radiance of a bittersweet fable, the timeless kind that rings psychologically true and feels emotionally uplifting without once striking a false or sentimental note. The result is that rarest of movies -- a succinct but highly charged piece in which every frame, every gesture, every word counts. Yes, attention must be paid, but in return for your efforts, Fila does what only a true artist can -- he repays you tenfold.

Even as the credits roll, the brutishness unfolds. In a rural backwater of Slovakia, a man beats and rapes and finally bludgeons his wife to death -- all under the watchful eyes of their young daughter. The killer is jailed, and the girl -- Lea -- appears 14 years later living in the dubious shelter of a foster home. Her face is now lovely, but her psyche is still traumatized -- she's virtually mute. Enter an outsider named Strehlow, a German in his 50s, who spots Lea and makes her caretakers an offer they won't refuse: 50,000 marks to buy the woman outright. Transaction completed, Strehlow and his prized purchase drive away (the time frame is incongruously modern) to his ramshackle farm, where he works as a furniture restorer. There, she repeatedly bolts; he aggressively retrieves her. Strehlow is a physically powerful figure, and he shows himself capable of using sheer force to control and contain Lea. Yet, loathesome as he is, there seems to be a self-imposed limit to his violence. Or is that just our wishful thinking?

All this takes place in near silence, with Fila giving the film a look to match its mood -- grey, dim, sombre. But then, slowly and almost imperceptibly, that mood starts to brighten. Initially, the exclusive source of the illumination is Lea herself, who, despite the horror of her world, cannot deny her essential nature: Innately and consummately, she is an artist, a creative soul driven to paint, to play music and, above all, to write with lyrical grace. If her every spoken word is a struggle, her every written word is a poem. And poetry flows from her, set down in letters that she furtively mails back to her Slovakian homeland. Intercepting these letters, her captor has them translated by a local woman (the great Hanna Schygulla in an evocative cameo), who applauds Lea's talent and urges Strehlow to respect it.

Remarkably, he does, for reasons that shouldn't be divulged but that strike us as completely convincing. Indeed, the two come to recognize in each other a common need, and learn to explore that need in a common language. That's the absolute wonder, and the credible hope, of this fable -- that the genuinely sensitive artist and the apparently brutish Philistine are connected in surprising ways and, moreover, that the connection is mutually beneficial. Symbolically, what Fila is conveying here is the power of the liberal arts to liberate -- in freeing Lea to her art, Strehlow ultimately frees himself to enjoy art's enveloping embrace. Quite literally, his world lightens, caught in a thrilling moment when Fila infuses the picture with a single, glorious burst of colour. To Strehlow and to us, it feels like an epiphany.

Acting mainly without words, forced to be as elliptical as the script, Lenka Vlasakova and Christian Redl are superb in the principal roles -- they hint, they suggest, they allude, and somehow a poignant clarity emerges. Talking about his equally elliptical approach to a novel, William Faulkner once said: "Everyone has a different idea of the beautiful. It's best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree." Lea is a gorgeous shadow; the tree is there for the making.