“Perla”: an existential thriller in Mitteleuropa

THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – TO SEE

A short introduction opens Perla , which evokes the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact forces in 1968. It will take time to understand how this theater of oppression and political violence concerns the film, and more specifically its heroine, who we find, by ellipsis, immediately in Vienna in the 1980s.

A meandering narrative is offered to us, which will seem to us to be of a formal and sensitive intelligence all the more justified once we have taken the measure of the weight of secrecy and wounded intimacy that it covers. Perla is a Slovak emigrant, a penniless painter, a single mother, a woman both whimsical and dark, fiercely independent, settled in Vienna in a certain precariousness with her daughter.

There she meets a man, Josef, who falls in love with her, leaves his wife to start a family with Perla and her daughter. Yet the story will lean towards an impossible normalization, first through discreet signs, then more and more directly. Mysterious calls that Perla keeps secret, the stubborn refusal to talk about her past, are in this respect the prologue to a confrontation with herself that is all the more difficult because it covers a trauma of great intensity.

You have 57.96% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.