Nigina Sayfullaeva's "Fidelity" — More Bad Than Good

A shame. The screening ends and you're already writing down its faults over the credits before getting on with the day — German theatre isn't going to keep turning up to shake you to the bone and leave a mark for life rather than for the length of a write-up. Time to get used to it: some films are good and some aren't.

Nigina Sayfullaeva's "Fidelity" is more bad than good on balance. My bright, naive expectations went nowhere: what came out was mostly a fight with our eternally forbidden subject of sex, as though the nineties never ended and someone had suddenly said we could shoot whatever we liked — so out it all came.

I honestly can't see what Anton Dolin, who worships Trier past the point of exhaustion, found revolutionary in it. In Lars's films the sex is justified down to the last frame; in "Fidelity" it's simply stated: look, be glad, we're allowed now.

Why do dim people always get to stand over us deciding what we may do? Why do we bleep swearing in theatres? Why is it assumed the audience will be corrupted by watching two people have sex?

The cast, thankfully, is mostly made up of people without inhibitions, unafraid of explicit scenes and ready for anything in the name of art. Zhenya Gromova has become close to the only reason I go to the cinema at all: soft, unforced, entirely her own work, visibly living each moment without pushing it, without straining to make the part memorable. Alexei Agranovich is simply a force of nature.

All of that is undone by a relentless claim to meanings and subtext that don't appear to exist. At moments it feels as if the actors aren't even saying their own lines — either it wasn't rehearsed or the parts were never worked out.

This could have been fresh, young, uncompromising cinema with no regard for what anyone thought. Which is what makes it a shame.