Sexytime in the Irish Hills?

I can identify with the characters in the film Nothing Personal. They are self-sufficient and solitary. One lives on a lonely island in Ireland, the other wanders around Europe like Forrest Gump. I can see pulling stunts like that. Personally, I plan on going Kerouac on everyone’s a-- for a couple of years someday.

Anne (Lotte Verbeek) is the wandering vagabond, scaring families by eating from garbage cans and truck drivers by faking insanity. She is almost feral. The film doesn’t fully explain her background, but she has abandoned her previous life. Anne finds Martin’s (Stephen Rea) house and begins to study him while camping out on his land.

At one point she breaks into his house and starts doing odd, child-like things to leave her scent on his possessions. When he shows interest in knowing her, she acts like a brat and wants to leave. Something tells her to stay. They make a food-for-work deal with a strict no intimacy clause.

The two eventually break through each other’s defenses. They spend days working side by side tending to the garden and moving dirt around, and arranging cute little fruit, bread and milk meals for each other. Maybe the film is trying to tell me something about the human experience?

I like how the film was shot, romanticizing the Irish hills and country, and the beautiful features and skin of Verbeek. The scenes are arranged into artsy close-ups, hands massaging sea weed into dirt or creeping closer and closer to each other, medium shots where both actors shine with nuanced expressions and body language, and overall shots of cold and lonely landscapes.

The story is character-based and not plot-based. There is a beginning, middle, and end, but I think writer/director Urszula Antoniak is encouraging viewers not to think too linearly, as flashes of text separate the film into chapters, but don’t exactly appear in familiar order.

The oddness of the characters and the small twists in the story make it a mostly enjoyable film. I don’t see mass market appeal for the story, though. It is too subtle and moves too slow. The central idea is that people need people, even though they may try to deny it by running or hiding themselves away.

I give Nothing Personal a C+. For me, the moral comes through a little too easy and clean in the story. I can appreciate the beautiful cinematography in the composition of shots, and the artful performances by the actors, but there seemed to be a spark missing from the film. I am going to be a harsh critic and blame it on tiny imperfections in the script.