Review: Limbo (2010)
Steve Rhodes
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 2011 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): ***
Scotland, Australia, Venezuela, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Alaska, Norway ...
What is the next place in this series?
Well if you're a nomadic housewife like the women in LIMBO, you will be
very curious about the answer but have no idea until your husband calls
and tells you your next location. These women are married to petroleum
engineers whose lives are a sequence of multi-year contracts to be busy
project managers at various large oil fields. It's a high paying
position that affords the families the ability to live a very upper
middle class lifestyle, complete with servants, normally associated with
a much more upper class life.
But with opulence comes a high level of instability as your kids keep
changing schools, cultures and languages. It also relegates the wife
from the status of an equal partner in the marriage to a subservient
follower of the whims and instabilities of her husband's ever changing
companies and bosses.
As we meet Sonia Moe, who her new cook and maid insist must be called
Mrs. Moe and not Sonia, she has just moved from the family's last
residence in Norway to their new "home" in Trinidad. As the perpetually
and ever more so lost Sonia, Line Verndal delivers a realistic
performance as the increasingly sad and utterly lost wife and mother.
As Jo Moe, Sonia's husband, Henrik Rafaelsen nails the part of the
husband who moves from clueless to hopeless to lost, albeit never as
emotionally drained as Sonia, who eventually goes into a full psychotic
break.
The story has some twists here and there, but mainly it is a gripping
character study of people living a lifestyle that few of us have ever
had to cope with. It might be easy to watch the movie and smugly sneer
at either spouse's actions, but that would be merely a defense mechanism
since it would be quite possible that we might act just as they did
under the same set of circumstances.
LIMBO runs 1:44. The film is in Swedish and in English, both with
English subtitles.
The film is being shown as part of San Jose's Cinequest Film Festival
(www.Cinequest.org), which runs March 1-13, 2011.
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