Peace to Us in Our Dreams

The cinema of Lithuanian director Sharunas Bartas is a very slow, unspoken, introspective cinema. A cinema that does not narrate, but contemplates. It can therefore easily bore you if you are not prepared to stand in front of the images with patience and a sense of waiting. Here the story, which ends in tragedy, is almost impalpable, almost transparent. A man and his companion, a young violinist, retire to his country house. Their relationship is uncertain, in crisis. With them is the man's young daughter: a light-eyed blonde who questions the meaning of existence by talking to her father and laying bare her insecurities. But her father's answers do not offer any certainty, if anything, even more doubt: we seek the truth, we try to reach it, but we never grasp it (says the father), it is good to have doubts (he reiterates). The little girl follows him attentively, uncertain. She has just met a boy of her age with a dog, they talked, they walked together, but the doubts remain. The violinist too wanders through the countryside, talking to the elderly wife of a fisherman who does not understand her. Uncertain dialogues between the characters follow one another, like the murmur of the wind, like the rustling of the leaves: words, like the sounds of nature, are there but we do not know what they are for, how long they will last. Death arrives unexpectedly in this placid, serene countryside. Nature becomes agitated, a storm is coming, the wind rises, the waves become threatening. And the film ends. And the viewer's thoughts continue to revolve around this story, moved by the wind, stirred by the storm.