British film opens Festival

Snow Cake film review

Welsh director Marc Evans's film almost didn't get made owing to lack of funds. Even when it was finished in the small, wintry town of Wawa, Utah, no one would have imagined it would be the opening competition attraction at the giant, equally wintry, Berlin Festival.

It is certainly a surprising choice with which to open the first of the three major European film festivals.It is a small, expertly acted movie about an introspective and desolate murderer who arrives in Wawa to start a new life after prison, and the autistic woman who puts him up and eventually thaws him out.

The surprise lies in the casting. Alan Rickman plays the man with a lump of guilt on his back and Sigourney Weaver the autistic woman, obsessed with cleaning and totally direct in her reactions to the ex-prisoner.

It is an odd-couple relationship that quietly flourishes precisely because both are wounded souls. Weaver spent nearly a year researching autism, and it shows. There is no grandstanding and no melodrama.

This is a story about a man with a past meeting someone living entirely for the moment.Rickman's performance too is quietly effective as his secret is discovered by the local law and he is told to leave town.

His murderer is not a frightening man, rather one who frightens himself. He grieves two losses - the man he killed and the woman in Wawa (Carrie-Anne Moss) with whom he has an affair but whom he has eventually to leave behind.

The screenplay was written in two days by Angela Pell who is not worried by the comedy of autism. "I did take on my own experience," she says, "because I have lived with autism and it is such a wonderful, surreal experience day by day".

The co-production between the UK's Revolution Films and Canada's Rhombus Media, has moments of uncertainty, when in trying to avoid any obvious drama, it loses its way.

Its intention is to remain in the memory not for any big moments but for the gathering up of many small ones.