Sweet Land
dir. Ali Selim
Libero, LLC

If thousands of years of storytelling have taught us something about love, it's that a love story is a difficult story to tell. And yet everyone seems to try. Sweet Land, a debut feature film from commercial director Ali Selim, is another attempt at telling such a tale. However, where Hollywood's myriad love stories tend to caricature this most indefinable experience, Selim's unassuming indie, developed over fourteen years and shot in just 24 days, speaks about love in the most honest, and cinematically effective, way: by hardly saying anything about it at all.

And though this choice may be more a product of the storyline (the tale does center on a cultural-linguistic divide), the furtive simplicity of the film's two main characters edging closer, from fondness to affection to devotion, is made incredibly compelling by a visual poetry that is subtle and surprising — much like, of all things, the actual experience of falling in love.

The plotline, instead of being epic and expansive, looks inward. It begins with Lars Torvik (Stephen Pelinski), whose grandmother Inge (Lois Smith here) has just passed. While Lars contemplates selling her farm for a hefty profit, her story is told. As a young woman in the 1920s, a big-eyed Inge (Elizabeth Reiser when young) arrives in rural Minnesota as a mail-order bride. Ostracized at first for being German, and barred from marrying the gruff and quiet Olaf (Tim Guinee) to whom she's been sent, the movie ambles until love manifests — between Inge and Olaf, between Inge and the town, between Inge and the land she is taught to tend each day — and then the film ends.

And that's exactly why Selim's take on love works. Because with it, like in life, love is an incidental occurrence that happens in the background while everything else goes on up front. While Olaf stubbornly tends his fields, Inge begins to look at him. As Inge struggles to learn English, Olaf's un-subtitled remarks grow weighted. When Inge moves into Olaf's cottage, he starts paying attention to her body. Finally, when they harvest the season's wheat, they begin to share a rhythm. By then we know it, but not because we're told: they've made the plunge.

Surely the more sentimentally inclined will root for love from the beginning. But the presence of such an expectation is more a product of Hollywood's conventions being deeply ingrained than of any explicit cue in Sweet Land's script. No character speaks of love — the word may not even be uttered in the film at all. Over the course of the story, love's gestation seems just as surprising to the characters as it does to those watching them on screen. And wholly unlike a Hollywood romance, love does not resolve a single plot conflict. (With it or without, the cohabitating couple surely would have wed — it was the 1920s.)

But Selim's unassuming take on the love story works because of the simplicity of its scope: it reminds us that love — that wonderful, elusive force — is, simply, wonderful and elusive. Instead of struggling to put into words the "why," or to take us places where we might understand "what it all could mean," he ends the film before the story asks for any explanation. Which is what makes the film uniquely successful. Explanation is where everyone else gets muddled in cliché.

— Joey Rubin (joey at flakmag dot com)