Scarred Hearts

When one has a serious illness requiring constant treatment, the body becomes a kind of prison, and when it is likely to be fatal, then one lives in that prison in a constant state of tension between despair and focused attention. In the case of the young protagonist here, that means a life reduced to what for him are its most necessary elements: women and literary traces, the latter both encountered and produced. And all of this also serves as a kind of oblique examination of the disease that has gripped Europe by the 1930s, as a potentially fatal tendency towards destructive irrationality, leaving in its wake, among other things, what Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe once called Europe’s “historial emphysema”. A film that is itself highly concentrated, yet somehow also diffuse, which, as mostly happens with death due to illness, does not build to any kind of climax but instead peters out, for better and for worse. Impressively photographed, and a refreshingly unchaste approach to the depiction of a historical milieu, but it still left this viewer with a feeling that with a slight twist it could have been stronger.