In her directorial debut “Abseits des Lebens”, Robin Wright plays a refugee from the world in front of a mountain backdrop.
The lonely forest hut has a special place in American cultural history. For the alternative culture of the sixties, the “cabin in the woods” was probably just as important as New York’s bohemian Greenwich Village.
When actress Robin Wright makes her directorial debut largely in a Spartan hut in the Rocky Mountains, this myth resonates unspoken. And the dropout she played doesn’t even have to mention the author Henry David Thoreau, who wrote his book “Walden or Life in the Woods” in such a place around 1850. Some sentences of this cult book of many 68ers seem to flow directly into their dialogue: “I wanted to live deeply”, says Thoreau, “to suck out all the marrow of life, to live so hard and spartan that everything that wasn’t life was put to flight became.”
With trauma in the forest
First, however, Wright’s film character Edee himself fled. At the beginning she explains to her empathetic therapist how difficult it is for her to be around people: “They always just want me to feel better.” She takes her answer that she is alone with her pain in solitude just as confirmation. The traumatic blow of fate is only revealed late in the film, which first almost drives her to suicide and then into the forests of Wyoming. Anyone who knows Hollywood melodramas, however, is probably correct with his suspicion; American films regularly tell of people who have to overcome the worst experiences of loss.
The life that an inexperienced city dweller expects alone in the mountains without electricity or running water is of course not quite the opposite of suicide. Edee fails even at chopping wood, and she is lucky that a visit from a bear only devastates her home. Another film drama comes to mind.
Robin Wright’s former husband Sean Penn made his 2007 film “Into the Wild” about the dangers of loneliness in the wilderness, based on the life story of student Christopher McCandless. Another US author of 19th century transcendentalism encouraged him to flee from civilization, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
But while Penn allowed himself two and a half hours to mix the sublime with the tragic in indulgent nature shots, Wright only needs 84 minutes. And after about half an hour she comes to the point where only a coincidence can save her heroine’s life.
A hunter named Miguel (Demián Bichir) finds her half frozen and starving. When the rescued woman comes to, she tells him in a friendly but firm manner that she is not interested in human contact. One agrees on a life support measure – a basic course in a few essential skills, such as hunting or chopping wood. Once again familiar film images come to mind: In how many westerns are there scenes in which women or children are taught to shoot by well-meaning trappers?
But it doesn’t turn into a romance, after all, Wright consistently refuses to accept this genre convention. After all, it was a severe depression that drove her character into the wilderness.
Nonetheless, the filmmaker seems to have lost sight of precisely this motif in her first movie. In the midst of the impressive nature shots, she plays her unvarnished heroine with her newfound ability to survive. Real work on trauma, dealing with loss and grief, on the other hand, hardly takes place. At the same time, the nature photographs do not have the necessary quality to go beyond the mere illustration of the story. Filmed in just 29 days in Canada, there was hardly enough material to at least convey the different seasons. How much more impressive is the currently successful competition film “Nomadland”.
In a predictable direction
Nature dramas are always experimental films too; their cameramen have to be open to the unexpected; In the end, “Into the Wild” had almost too many breathtaking images for a single film. The simple story of “Land”, as Wright’s film is called in the original, on the other hand, strives in a predictable direction: Even the humble rescuer has to work through a trauma in which that of the protagonist is reflected. The resulting narrative is so thin that it would have fitted into an episode of the old television series “The Man in the Mountains”.
How much one would like to see more in this sympathetic independent film, which premiered at the last Sundance film festival in similarly scenic Utah. But although it is almost too long for the little that he wants to tell, he makes far too little of his possibilities. Unfortunately, less is no more – if you can’t separate yourself from the Hollywood ballast even in a lonely forest hut.
Away from life. USA 2021. Director: Robin Wright. 84 min.
