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Alpine Fire
A year on an Alpine farm: an older couple have two children, Belli, who wanted to be a teacher, and the younger Franzi, deaf, and although he works like a man, child-like. Belli teaches him. In his work, he can become frustrated, so when he throws an expensive mower over a cliff in a fit of pique, his father banishes him to the outskirts of the farm, where he uses pubescent energy to break rocks and build walls and cairns. (It's the tradition of the father's family, called "The Irascibles" by neighbors, to spend puberty doing this.) Belli visits him and they begin sleeping together. By winter, the boy is back in the house and Belli is pregnant. Soon her parents must know.
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Reviews
I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.
Absolutely brilliant
Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.
One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.
"Höhenfeuer" or "Alpine Fire" is a 30-year-old movie set in the Alps. The language is Swiss German and the accents are very thick, so make sure you get a good set of subtitles watching this. The cast is fairly small, which I usually like as there are not too many characters to concentrate on. These almost 2 hours were the Swiss submission to the Academy award 1 year after the country won the honor, but this one did not even come close to such an achievement. The director is Fredi M. Murer, not exactly a prolific filmmaker, but one of Switzerland's most influential writers and directors in the last 50 years. I am not familiar with any of the cast members in here. Some of them had decent career, some not so much, some even never appeared in any other film. I guess people outside Switzerland will have difficulties recognizing any of them.The story is about a brother and sister who grow very close, and at some point too close and become a couple. So yep, this is a film about incest, but nothing too explicit really. Things get even more complicated when the girl is pregnant. I guess you could give Murer a thumbs up for achieving that I found the two somewhat likable despite their obscene and forbidden tendencies. Maybe it was because pretty much everybody else was fairly unlikeable and the duo felt more like victims of the whole situations than really doing something horrible. Nonetheless, I must say, even if this was a pretty atmospheric watch, it was simply too long. The story just wasn't enough for almost 120 minutes. A half hour less would have been fine, maybe around the 85-minute mark. In my opinion, that way the film would have been more relevant and also essential. This way here, I cannot recommend it. Thumbs down.
No, I'm not into Heimatfilm!!! The more I'm delighted by finding this masterstroke by Fredi Murer. A film that can't be compared to anything I've yet. The swiss alps are home and place of this drama. Bub and Belli are sisters and they fall in love; mostly cause there is no one else to fall in love with on their father's farm. The actors do amazing work on their difficult characters while the whole setting is beautiful and depressing at once... Even humor isn't completely lacking in this drama!A film that produces unforgettable moods and scenes....Watch it!!!
It is impossible to speak of the central fact of the plot of this lovely film without spoiling it, but it is worth mentioning that it draws on (and asks to be compared to) Alpine folktales. The isolation of the family is an aspect of many Swiss and other montagnard tales; in this film, the tension between the lure of the modern world (it happens in 1984, after all) and the traditional ways of the mountain is constantly there, but somewhat subdued. The choice of the family to keep their deaf son at home (rather than institutionalizing him) leads to dramatic complications and precipitates the startling conclusion (not "inadequate," in my view, but definitely open to varied interpretation). That the son breaks rock--both as punishment and as a kind of affirmation of his connection to the natural world--while the mother continues prayers to the Blessed Virgin that seem never to have been answered, nor likely to be--also link the story to traditional folktales. Overall, it has that in common with John Sayles's Secret of Roan Inish and perhaps Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust, but there is very little reverence for the past in this film, as contrasted with those others. It is definitely a film worth renting and viewing. Slow, yes, but intense.
This is a really interesting movie with an open end. For me, Johanna Lier, who played Belli, did a great job and made this movie really good.
