In the process of watching the new film by prolific Spanish director Isabel Coixet, a couple of big, philosophical heavy-hitters sprang to mind, most notably Lars Von Trier’s Dogville and Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs. These films – both radical, bible-black explorations of small-town menace transforming into violence – sadly tower above the mostly-wretched Un Amor, which borrows some of their key notions while filtering everything through a lens of a cheap romance novel sentimentality.
Laia Costa invests herself admirably in the lead role of Nat, a depressed city girl and one-time translator for stranded refugees who has had enough of that life and is now dialling back both her professional duties and her financial outgoings. Her new, less traumatising job allows her to live peacefully in a tumbledown shack in a rural village where everyone knows your name AND, it transpires, your sexual activities.
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She doesn’t try too hard to settle in and endear herself to the locals, even if slimey guttersnipe and stained-glass windows maker Pieter (Hugo Silva) does his passive-aggressive best to make her feel welcome. Nat is gifted a dog (a clunking metaphorical device) by her landlord who she names Surly due to its brooding nature. It’s only when she sees that her dream of a rural idyll might come to a swift end due to the endless and expensive repairs required on the properyy that she meets growling man-bear Andreas (aka The German) played by Hovik Keuchkerian. In bracingly straight-talking style, he offers his services as a builder and repairman in exchange for sex.
Initially Nat bridals, but, for reasons that are never entirely clear, she then has a change of heart. From this point the film meanders back and forth between steamy trysts, grumpy dogs, nosy neighbours and our heroine’s wavering sense of self worth. The story is all over the place, and just when we’re about to deal with one issue, another one is thrown into the mix. The use of countrified archetypes makes the narrative surprises somewhat thin on the ground, and on the final straight Coixet leans in for some very corny scenes of high emotion that she milks for all they’re worth.
There are certainly some interesting, counterintuitive ideas in the film, namely the character of Andreas who doesn’t end up being the man we think he’s going to be. And Nat, too, is chided for thinking she can turn her back on the responsibilities of her job, narcissistically offloading the trauma of her subjects onto herself. Yet as the slightly embarrassing final scene of the film rolls around, all good will flies out the window.
