Antares (2004)
A nurse in Vienna Austria, with a nice family, good husband & teenage daughter, has an affair with another man for kinky sex in a hotel room, because...she can.
Three women, one Vienna tower block, and enough lust, lies and bad decisions to make the concrete sweat.
Götz Spielmann’s Antares begins with a car crash, then rewinds into three overlapping stories about people living within shouting distance of one another yet trapped in private worlds of desire, jealousy and loneliness. Eva is a married night nurse with a teenage daughter, a comfortable home and a decent husband, Alfred, whose idea of rescuing their tired marriage is finding a better apartment. What Eva wants is something less sensible. When Tomasz, a doctor passing through Vienna, reappears in her life, she follows him into a hotel room and unleashes years of buried appetite in a brief, ferocious affair involving blindfolds, photographs and sex stripped of romantic excuses. The second story follows Sonja, a supermarket cashier desperately trying to keep her wandering boyfriend Marco. She pretends to be pregnant, monitors his movements and clings harder as the evidence of his...
cheating becomes impossible to ignore. Marco, meanwhile, is sleeping with Nicole, a neighbour trying to escape her own collapsing relationship. Nicole has separated from Alex, an angry real-estate agent who treats rejection as a temporary misunderstanding and intimidation as a legitimate form of courtship. As the same few days are replayed from different angles, background faces become central characters, casual encounters acquire new meaning, and every lie passes through another person’s life. Spielmann is less interested in tidy moral lessons than in showing how hunger turns selfish, affection becomes possession and ordinary people quietly wreck one another while believing they are merely trying to survive. The storytelling has the intersecting design of Amores Perros, but its emotional temperature is icier: the camera watches without flinching, allowing moments of tenderness, humiliation and sudden violence to sit beside each other without telling us whom to forgive. Some viewers may find it slow or emotionally remote, but that chill is also what makes the film linger. It feels less like melodrama than secretly watching several real households reach the point where politeness can no longer contain what is boiling underneath.
This is Vienna in the early 2000s, but not the postcard Vienna of palaces, waltzes and cream cakes. Spielmann plants us on the city’s outer edge among anonymous residential towers, stained lifts, cramped kitchens, supermarkets, hospital corridors, cheap hotel rooms and roads that seem designed to carry people past one another rather than bring them together. The film was shot in Vienna, with the interiors of its similar-looking apartments constructed at the Lotus Film studios in Korneuburg; that repetition is deliberate, making three different lives appear almost interchangeable from outside. Its scenic highlight is precisely the lack of conventional beauty: hard concrete, grey skies, sodium-lit streets and windows overlooking more concrete. Against that deadened landscape, every burst of sex, panic or violence feels hotter. The vibe is unmistakably Austrian arthouse—bleak, candid and faintly absurd, with shades of Michael Haneke and Ulrich Seidl—yet it is not completely without compassion. Beneath the brutalist gloom is the unsettling thought that these isolated people are connected more closely than they know, their desires crossing walls and social boundaries while they remain emotionally miles apart.
Petra Morzé is the film’s magnetic centre as Eva, playing her as an attractive, mature woman whose respectable exterior conceals a startlingly physical sexual hunger. Her allure comes from the contrast: composed nurse and suburban wife one moment, fearless adulterous lover the next. She and Andreas Patton commit to scenes of full-frontal nudity and exceptionally graphic sex that are intimate, sweaty and deliberately lacking in soft-focus glamour; this is unmistakably adult material, especially in the first episode. Susanne Wuest brings a pale, brittle beauty and painful desperation to Sonja, while Martina Zinner gives Nicole a tougher, earthier sensuality beneath her defensive manner. None of the women is presented as polished fantasy flesh, and that is exactly why they are so effective: they look, move and desire like real women caught at their most exposed. Morzé gets the most erotically daring role, but all three actresses make vulnerability look dangerously seductive.
A night shift nurse in Vienna Austria, with a great home, good job, nice family, a good husband and a teenage daughter, has an affair with another man and meets him regularly for kinky sex in a hotel room, because… she can.
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