The Deceived Woman

For ten years Nina (Wende Snijders) was happily involved with Boris. She loved him and was sure: with this man she will spend the rest of her life. But now Boris is dead. A car accident has taken him out of Nina's life. But her grief is intensified by the realization that she has been lied to all along by the love of her life. Because as it turns out, Boris has been leading a double life all along. He is married and has children. The already traumatised Nina falls into a deep hole after this discovery. There is no way she can continue her everyday life like this. And so Nina breaks out of her life and embarks on a fateful journey through Europe. At the side of truck driver Matthias (Sascha Alexander Gersak) she even seems to be able to escape her worries for a short time. But the weight of her grief continues to press mercilessly on her soul...

The Deceived Woman is a very difficult film. On the one hand, you have to give director Sacha Polak credit for being able to build a certain fascination with the two-part, non-linear narrative structure and bleak visual language that is hard to resist. Also, it cannot be denied that lead actress Wende Snijders delivers a very intense performance that makes Nina's pain palpable in almost every second. On the other hand, the film is overall very bulky in its staging. It takes a long time to get to any real dialogue. Most of the time the viewer is confronted with Nina's suffering facial expression. And this is not only extremely depressing in the long run, but also extremely exhausting.

In addition, especially in the second part, which is the first to be seen, no story is told in the classical sense. If you haven't read up on what the film is about beforehand, you'll spend almost an hour here wondering what it's all about. You only find out - albeit in a fragmentary way - in the first part of the plot shown in the second half, the end of which in turn leaves you with a big question mark about what you saw first.

Surely, cinema doesn't always have to tell feel-good stories. Cinema can - and should - be challenging and emotionally stirring at times. That's exactly what The Deceived Woman aims to do. But Sacha Polak's high ambitions make it almost impossible for the audience to gain access to the main character and her fate. And this inevitably leads to the fact that the film seems arguably undercooled and could leave the viewer not only perplexed but also very bored. Surely there will be those arthouse lovers who see the film's real strength in these very points of criticism and consider it great art. But since the drama will probably only open up to a very small audience in this way, there is only one at this point: worth seeing with reservations!

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp