Eye For Film >> Movies >> Antares (2004) Film Review
Antares
Reviewed by: Amber Wilkinson
Whatever happened to linear films with clear and concise plotting?
Antares is another nail in the coffin of brevity. It’s a rambling tale of people connected by something tenuous, which is intended to add up to something significant. In this case, the link is the huge apartment complex where they all live.
Alfred (Harry Prinz) and Eva (Petra Morze) are middle-class and middle-aged. Eva isn’t getting her kicks at home, so she’s taken on a lover, whose backstory we are thankfully spared. What we aren’t spared, however, is sex and there’s a lot of full-frontal action — letting the women in the audience in on exactly what it is Eva sees in Tomasz (Andreas Patton).
Elsewhere in the complex, Marco (Dennis Cubic) is a billboard poster putter upper (wonder if there’s a real job title for that?). He lives with his paranoid and ultra jealous girlfriend Sonja (Suzanne Wuest) — which is handily just around the corner from his lover Nicole (Martina Zinner).
Nicole, unlike Tomasz, comes with enough backstory for two. She’s trying to ditch her violent ex, who just won’t take no for an answer.
The main problem with this is that it is simply too fragmented.
We get heaps of Eva and her well-hung man going at it like tongs before we cut to Marco and his life. Sadly, at this point, writer/director Gotz Spielmann pops the first plotline on the back burner for so long that by the time he gets back round to it you’ve almost forgotten it existed. This is annoying, but even more irritating is his desire to play around with the timeline. There is no good reason for the non-linear elements of this film. So what, if a couple of events occur simultaneously? Choosing not to cut between them, but rather expecting your audience to do your editing for you after the fact isn’t big, or clever.
Also, Antares has no clear message, except possibly to be, as one of the characters says «pretty and sad, like life». The only revelation is just how many plot strands Spielmann thinks are necessary to achieve his goal of saying nothing.
Reviewed on: 23 Aug 2005
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Multi-layered plotlines around the inhabitants of an apartment complex.
Director: Gotz Spielmann
Writer: Gotz Spielmann
Starring: Petra Morze, Andreas Patton, Hary Prinz, Susanne Wuest, Dennis Cubic, Martina Zinner, Andreas Kiendl
Year: 2004
Runtime: 119 minutes
Country: Austria
Festivals:
EIFF 2005
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Review by Graham ★★★½
Four years before the brilliant Revanche, Götz Spielmann warmed up his lens with an interesting coming together of characters set against a somehow entirely unsexy set of un-simulated sexy time. It must take some skill to create scenes with entirely regular people going at it without the slightest bit of sensuality. Maybe it’s an Austrian thing?
Peculiar.Interesting.
The primary characters all live in the same slab of dull concrete, with lives that are letting them down, and spiralling. What can they do to make things more interesting? You guessed it…
Messed up relationship drama with a smattering of grim reality and raw lustfulness is definitely my jam, and this was a solid effort.
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Review by TajLV ★★★
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Kids, look away. This unrated film from Austrian writer-director Götz Spielmann is beyond R-rated, with lots of full frontal nudity, unprotected sex and adultery. Indeed, it opens with a traffic accident, as a car plows through an intersection into a taxi in which the rear passenger is looking at some very graphic photos of a certain middle-aged woman.
The film is made up of three interlinked stories. In the first, Eva Hostätter (Petra Morzé) is that woman in the photos. She’s a night-shift nurse at a Viennese hospital. At home in her aging apartment block, she has a teenage daughter Iris (Xenia Ferchner) and…
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Review by ₳ⱠØⱠ ★★★★
We follow the lives of three highly dysfunctional couples as their stories ultimately converge. I’m always a fan of movies that focus on complex interpersonal relationships, especially if there’s some weird sex shit thrown in there. The bleak industrial backdrop of the city reflected the desolate and banal aspects of the characters’ lives so the whole thing was pretty dismal & gloomy and hey, that’s what i came for. It actually reminded me a bit of Haneke’s ‘The Seventh Continent’ (minus the at the end).
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Review by Robin Hislop ★★★★
Classy, serious filmmaking. A portrait of complicated, messy lives; more open-ended, and less satisfying, than Revanche.
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Review by Tuna ★★★★
very impactful & compelling, masterfully intervowen representations of (in)ordinary lives stuck between visible & invisible walls.
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Review by Waldo ★★★★
Borrows some from Amores Perros with the one car accident and three different stories coming together or closely passing each other but the director puts his own spin and we got a good movie here. Three women, an adulterous nurse, an extremely jealous check out girl and an unhappy married woman. A strong drama about lust, secrets, lies and little perversions.
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Review by slowtorture ★★★★
Nothin makes me feel better than watchin some lovers do fucked up shit to each other!!! I don’t usually love movies where you follow a bunch of different people and then it all kinda laces together in the end but this one was very good. It did take me three days to watch tho…. because it is not spooky
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Review by Nelson Brown ★★★
The 69th film I’ve logged this year on Letterboxd…
There’s not really that much to this other than the 3 interwoven stories, and it’s not that I don’t get it. But Revanche DEFINITELY was a better movie than this.
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Review by Caro ★★★½
We love dysfunctional relationships
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Review by Joe Hughey ★★★
A few unhappy Austrians have sex with each other (and in front of strangers) in a Götz Spielmann joint. There are worse ways to spend two hours.
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Review by donovanmcnabbie ★★★★
Götz I need more trams
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Review by backwardsman ★★★★
A truly ambitious austrian ensemble piece with an interwoven narrative in the same vein of “Magnolia”, “Antares” is a very explicit film that explores different people and their relationship to each other. Its about how we influence each other and what effect certain actions have on other peoples lives. Spielmann does a fabulous job at combining each individual storyline and giving these stories their own characteristics and dramaturgy. They feel authentic and with a few exceptions very naturalistic. Spielmann for the most part doesn’t rely on cliches and plot conventions but rather lets the characters guide the audience through the emotional core of the film.
I had issues with the depiction of a certain character and thought that it was…
