GODDESS: HOW I FELL IN LOVE

In her feature film debut, Renata Litvinova uses a thriller-plot as the blueprint for a seemingly surrealistic development: A father goes to the police because his daughter has disappeared. He suspects a couple living right above him to have kidnapped her. The investigator Faina, played by Litvinova herself, searches for her, convinced that the child is still alive. The investigation proves to be difficult, especially since the couple commits suicide. Faina also has to cope with loneliness, and the desolate surroundings do their best to hinder the investigation: the policewoman, looking like a pale angel, has to deal with her mother and her colleagues; she practically does not eat, apparently only lives for others, unable to save herself. The rundown houses of the city – often contrasted with a forest aisle with symmetrically placed trees – are bathed in an ice-blue light; people appear isolated and inconsolable. Suggestively accompanied by Nick Cave’s music, they stumble through Tarkovskian surroundings of Dostoyevskian feelings of guilt and atonement, as if they were in a surreal land of fairy tales, death awaiting them at the end of the road. In a sequence near the end of the film, where dozens of interviewees give the same answer, the director enlightens the audience about the meaning of life: love.