Director: Ursula Meier (France, Belgium, Switzerland). Year of Release: 2022
A village at the foot of the Swiss mountains. We open with a long slow motion shot of a family argument. A woman with short brown hair is being held back by two men. Suddenly she breaks out and lunges at an older woman with dyed blonde hair. As the blonde woman runs away, the brunette slaps her on the ear, causing her to fall on a baby grand piano (yes, this is the sort of family which has a baby grand in the living room).
Next scene, the brunette, Margaret, is at the police station with a cut on her forehead. The officer is telling her that she’s being placed under an exclusion order. For the next 3 months, she won’t be allowed within 100 metres of her mother’s home – where until now she has been living in the garage. Soon after, Margaret returns to pick a fight with her step-father, but is blocked by her teenage younger sister Marion, who doesn’t want to see any more violence.
The police escort Margaret to her mother’s house, to pick up her stuff. She’s not allowed to take everything, but she’s keen to be sure that she taker her electric guitar and an amp. Needing somewhere to stay, she is offered a sofa by Julien, an ex and former musical collaborator, but only under the condition that she doesn’t get involved in any more fights. Whenever Margaret returns home, Julien checks her face and knuckles for the sign of any new bruising.
We slowly learn some of the reasons for Margaret’s violence, but are mainly left to assume that she just has a volatile personality. Margaret is often painted in broad 2-dimensional brushstrokes. This does add a certain unpredictability to her character – we’re never quite sure when she’s going to flare up again. Nonetheless it would have been nice to know more of her backstory. Stéphanie Blanchoud plays Margaret well, but you can only do so much with relatively meagre materials.
The core to Margaret’s anger is her difficult relationship with her diva mother Christina. Christina could have been a contender – she was set to be a successful concert pianist when she fell pregnant with Margaret. Unable to carry on playing concerts, she found work as a piano teacher, something she reminds her daughters of at every available possibility. Christina shows little empathy, and eagerly makes herself the centre of attention in every possible scene.
This means that when Christina says that being hit by her daughter has led to her losing hearing in one ear, we’re not sure for quite a while whether she’s actually telling the truth. She ostentatiously sells the baby grand, saying that she can’t teach any more and it’s no use to her now, although she makes sure that she dons an elaborate dress to perform a final concert to her family. She’s good – but that’s not the point, which is that she knows that she is good and milks it for all she’s worth.
Fairly early on, Christina dumps her macho obnoxious partner for the inappropriately aged Hervé, a man who she knows so little that she doesn’t even know what size shirts he wears. As her mother has abandoned any pretence of responsible parenting, Marion tries to deal with her troubled sister, painting a blue line marking the 100 metre limit from the house that Margaret is not allowed to pass – even though this means losing unregistered work for the local fishmonger.
Margaret offers to help Marion continue with her singing lessons, which have been let slip by their dilettante mother. Margaret brings her guitar and amp to the edge of the blue line, where she accompanies Marion who sings sacred songs. Margaret is bemused by her sister’s religosity, but in the face of her self-destructing family, Marion needs some sort of stability to which she can cling to, and she makes pacts with God to give her life some sort of purpose.
Marion – played by the new actor Elli Spagnalo – slowly becomes the moral compass of the film. Her sisters – Margaret, and Louise, who appears first heavily pregnant and later with twin daughters, provide most of the melodrama, but are never fully portrayed as fully rounded characters. Marion, though, is the girl who has to live with the destruction created by her dysfunctional family, and is the only person who really seems to be trying to make things better.
Die Linie is strongly acted, and looks good. The end credits say that it is produced by the Dardenne brothers, who have directed a string of gritty dramas. The relative wealth of the family makes this feel less of a story of everyday life than the Dardennes at their best. Instead, it often feels beser with First World Problems, which are important to the people directly involved, but unable to sufficiently move us as observers.
A minor quibble, There is one weird line where someone organises a concert for Margaret to play. She asks when it’s going to be, and they tell her “a week after Christmas”. You mean New Year, right? This is a tiny detail, but one which gives the impression that while the writers were clear about the general story that they wanted to tell, they were a little more laissez faire when it came to the actual script. It’s not a biggie, but how on earth did this line pass through the various edits?
All in all, Die Linie is a pleasant enough afternoon/evening spent in the cinema. It tells a halfway interesting story about a family struggling to cope. The family is a little bit too well off to provide too much dramatic tension – “we’ve got to sell the baby grand” is hardly Grapes of Wrath territory. And the characters are not fully enough rounded for us to care too much about what happens to them. But it’s diverting enough, which in these days of crap cinema counts as a compliment.
CinePhil 