‘The Line’: Berlin Review

Dir: Ursula Meier. Switzerland/France/Belgium. 2022. 102 mins.

In her first full dramatic feature since Sister, which won the Silver Bear for Best Director at Berlin a decade ago, French-Swiss filmmaker Ursula Meier returns to the festival with another story about boundaries, or the lack of them, within a fractured family unit. It’s a story with a brilliant conceptual framework that never quite coalesces into a satisfying drama.

Feels in the end like the kind of dysfunctional family drama we’ve seen so many times before

The line of the title is a notional one at first – an ‘exclusion zone’ around the family home of troubled thirty-something Margaret (played by musician Stéphanie Blanchoud, who also co-wrote the script). She has been served with a restraining order after attacking her pianist mother Christina – an attack captured in the silent, slow-motion footage that plays alongside the opening credits – and ordered to keep at least 100 metres away from the house. When Margaret’s grasp of distance proves to be unreliable, her younger sister Marion gets a bucket of blue paint and marks the boundary – over roads, fields and even down a grassy bank and into a canal.

In Meier’s intriguing and widely distributed 2008 debut, Home, a whole family lived inside the line (a newly-inaugurated motorway) that separated them from the outside world, and the cracks that would destroy them were almost invisible – until suddenly they weren’t. In Sister, a cable car line linked two different worlds, the up of a posh Swiss ski resort and the down of the anonymous town below, where other lines were crossed in a 12-year-old’s complicated relationship with his older sister.

Neither were perfect, but Home was nevertheless a refreshingly original human-comedy-of-the-absurd, while the Dardennes-like Sister worked because of our desperate sympathy with its young protagonist. Despite its striking conceptual premise, The Line – on which the Belgian directing brothers serve as co-producers – feels in the end like the kind of dysfunctional family drama we’ve seen so many times before. In its three co-production territories, distributors are already locked in. Elsewhere, it may struggle to gain much traction.

The Swiss suburban location of The Line is not a million miles away from the functional ski resort service town of Sister. When the wiry, tense, crop-haired Margaret is thrown out after lunging at her mother, she staggers through a wintry wasteland in front of a ribbon-development town dominated by horizontal lines. It’s an irony not lost on us that the only circle in the landscape, implacably fixed by Agnes Godard’s widescreen photography, is the one she can’t cross around the family house – and it’s a circle that represents discord rather than cohesion. This is also a film suffused with music, from Beethoven’s piano sonatas to the soft rock ballads of French singer-songwriter Benjamin Biolay, who is rather good in a small role here as Margaret’s former musical and romantic partner. But a long final scene set in a club where Margaret performs a torch song she’s composed seems more a dutiful showcase for Blanchoud’s musical talent than the emotional knockout blow it’s designed to be.

Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi plays Christina, the mother who may be the cause of Margaret’s anger-management issues, and certainly does little to placate them with her selfishness and casually cruel takedowns of all three of her daughters. She’s almost happy to discover that her eldest daughter’s attack has affected her hearing, and thus completed the total ruin of a once promising career as a classical pianist which started with the birth of Margaret. A certain stridency in Bruni-Tedeschi’s performance is indulged – or perhaps engendered – by a script that is rather too fond of symbolic set pieces, like a scene in which she gives a final performance on her grand piano when it’s already been loaded onto the removal company’s trailer.

But the deeper problem is Margaret herself. Stéphanie Blanchoud puts in a decent performance, though it comes without much nuance, and her damaged character is more convincing when on a redemptive, healing curve than as the ball of fury whose fits of violence – marked on her body by bruises and scars in various states of freshness – are never traced back to any source other than that seriously annoying mother. It gradually emerges, however, that this isn’t really her story – or at least, it shouldn’t be. It’s Marion, her much younger sister, who really carries the audience’s sympathy as a young girl caught between an unreliable, manipulative mother and a sister who should be a role model, but has become a mess of complexes, and herself needs mothering. First time actress Elli Spagnolo is a revelation, bringing real empathy to her account of a pubescent girl trying to bring some order to the chaos and pain that surrounds her, whether it be with a can of paint or the religious faith she holds onto like an amulet. The Line is crying out to be her film, not Margaret’s.