? Suspicion and
confusion greet a German mail-order bride (Elizabeth Reaser) who arrives at the
end of World War I in a Minnesota farm community. Her nationality, combined
with her lack of English skills, delays the wedding.
+ This is a quiet,
subtle movie that’s partly about a young woman adapting to a new setting while
not speaking the language, partly about a young couple’s halting courtship, and
partly about what it might have been like to live in that time and place. I
can’t think of another film that shows the process of learning language so
well. The heroine knows no English at first (but for one comic phrase), and we
watch, bit by bit, as she becomes more conversant. Reaser has to do a lot
without speaking much, and she should garner some attention with her
performance. The movie is beautifully shot on location in the stark Minnesota
landscape.
- I’m a big fan of
subtlety, but this might be too minimalist for my taste. Unless I missed
it, you never really learn what led the main character to emigrate or why she
became a socialist, for example. The film’s flashback structure adds little.
And I thought it was a little unnatural how much the other characters speak to
someone they know only speaks German.
= *** I found this
story an absorbing collection of mostly small moments, but it might bore some
people.
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