LIFF 2010: THE WOMAN WHO DREAMT OF A MAN review

Director Per Fly's The Woman Who Dreamt Of A Man is about sex. Got your attention? Passion realised as sexual obsession, to be exact, but like all films trying to be serious about the reasons people lust for each other it's got any number of potential pitfalls to overcome. Imagine a chart from laughable (most of Zalman King's work) up to phenomenal (Shinya Tsukamoto's masterpiece A Snake of June). The Woman... ultimately lodges in the upper half of that scale, though it stops just about everywhere on the way.

The title is almost the entire premise - Karen (Sonja Richter), a successful fashion photographer, meets Maciek (Marcin Dorocinski), a lecturer the spitting image of the man she's had darkly erotic dreams about for some time. She follows him, and when he challenges her, she explains the reason she's so fascinated by him. Drawn together by her story, the two of them - both married - begin an increasingly passionate affair, but things don't turn out quite like the fantasy she's been nursing.

There's a passage in Josephine Hart's novel Damage where the protagonist, describing another bout of desperate sexual congress, asks (paraphrased): look, does it matter how I penetrated her? Or with what? The Woman... is at its best when it grasps what Hart was driving at, and veers close to laughable when it thinks the actions the two leads are driven to are more interesting than the psychology behind them.

For the most part, Fly keeps up a solid narrative arc that's easy to follow but he shoots individual scenes within that arc in wildly different emotional registers. One moment the film's all impeccably costumed pretty people in high contrast, smoky colours like some over-produced beer commercial, then it switches gears to become a cold, sparing little stage production with everyone's life seemingly in ruins, next it swerves into comically theatrical melodrama where screaming is the quickest way to let the audience know how upset everyone is.

To be fair, the director never once comes close to Skinemax territory. He clearly understands the sickness (literal or metaphorical) behind obsession, the madness of it and the thrill of wanting something indulged. Those scenes where the needle goes off the scale are few; frequently The Woman... is a wonderfully slow, subtle dance of a film, making it plainly obvious things are going to go badly wrong but setting this up well enough the viewer feels compelled to find out how badly.

Richter fares best of the two leads, visibly consumed by the idea her dreams have literally come true, with Karen quietly determined to have Maciek no matter what the cost. She never comes across as mannered or actorly, lost in all aspects of the role from key passages of dialogue to the love scenes. Her conversations with her family are a particular highlight, the big confrontation with her husband (Michael Nyqvist, the Millennium series) a pitch-perfect, chilling display of recrimination and helpless, silent grief.

But when the needle does jump it usually feels terribly misjudged, the kind of hysterical posturing more suited to some racy late-night Lifetime TV movie. Both leads are visibly trying, but script, pacing and production values all end up against them - yes, there's hatesex, yes, there's a screaming fit, yes, there's plot twists and every time the writing or the direction or the score leap schizophrenically into overwrought, syrupy nonsense that repeatedly threatens to derail the film altogether.

There's a method behind this, too, and to give Fly his due the big reveal in The Woman... is in some respects quite clever. There's a clear rationale behind the story and the final twist is thoughtful and dramatically appropriate. And yet, like the rest of the running time, it's still on shaky ground.

A last-minute 'Gotcha!', however smart, is still a last-minute 'Gotcha!'. There's a casual air about the finale that feels a little too arty and detached to be wholly convincing. While it's more than worth watching, The Woman... feels like a film constructed around a single witty idea, rather than anything built up organically around the characters and their lives. Everything is subordinate to that last little wink from the director that says, what, you were expecting something else?

It's still a very good, if not great film, a beautifully shot, hauntingly erotic, frequently sharply observant little psychodrama that understands a good deal about human frailty as well as our preconceptions of how relationships should play out. Anyone looking for a thought-provoking evening's entertainment should consider this particular chamber piece recommended. Still, one can only hope whatever Per Fly's next idea might be, he doesn't feel quite so compelled to make sure the audience understands how smart he is.

(The Woman Who Dreamt Of A Man was screened as part of the 24th Leeds International Film Festival.)