**CONTAINS MAJOR PLOT SPOILER**
The overt drama in Ann-Kristin Rayels’ FORMENTERA springs from the conceit that drunken revellers might think it reasonable to swim from the eponymous Balearic island to its neighbour Ibiza, leaving their friends to fear what might have happened to one of them in the attempt.
But that merely creates a strained atmosphere of hidden tensions between Ben (Thure Lindhardt, ANGELS & DEMONS) and Nina (Sabine Timoteo, L’AMOUR, L’ARGENT, L’AMOUR) who have come to the island without their 3-year-old daughter, for reasons which are not immediately clear. In the parched interior of Formentera they visit a nest of hippies, young and old, who Ben knows from his youth there. One of them, Georg (Jef Layton), saved him from drowning and now they have some business plan together. The older German–speakers (this multi–national cast slips easily between German and English) show every sign of being wealthy retirees, and keep a local as a pet. He sells trinkets to the stupider tourists on the beach and Mara (Vicky Krieps, HANNA, ANONYMOUS), his partner, sells massages to the more attractive ones.
Formentera is presented in curiously flat light, bright but overcast. The contrast comes between places and times and thoughts and feelings. The action is split between energetic parties on the beach (featuring Bonaparte, a Berlin punk/performance art ensemble) and slow bucolic life back at the commune. In the long silences Nina starts to come apart, partly through premature survivor’s guilt, partly through a lack of sympathy for the weirdly isolated life Georg and his gang live, in their quiet house. Out of the silence come revelations about a deep hidden rift between Ben and Nina and their differing aspirations for their young family. But, the missing long distance swimmer turns up after a few days, and apparently that makes everything all right again. The absence of genuine tragedy weakens this drama (what’s left are all “white people’s problems”) Ben and Nina hop onto their Vespa and tootle off back towards Berlin. It would be interesting to know how their issues resolve in the cold Berliner Luft. But not very.
Great review. Proper critic.
The couple leave Formentera early, and it’s only all right because they are leaving, as little has been resolved between them. Ben’s overenthusiastic interest in Mara is just symptomatic of his failure to appreciate Nina and take her thoughts and feelings into consideration: he wants out of Berlin, and tries to sidle up to her with a holiday that he wants to turn into plans for moving there.
I honestly feel that this review misses much, for there are not even the multiple parties on the beach that it suggests, and a good deal of the stifling atmosphere of the shared live that no one really cares to consider might not suit Nina or her needs as a person: fit in or freak out, but we only care in a superficial way if you do, is the message from the older couples.