This week's Talk Cinema movie: Moscow, Belgium

[Lydia Leftcoast]

This quiet little film takes place in Moscou, Belgium, a suburb of Ghent, where we first see Matty, a middle-aged woman with two children in tow, glumly pushing a cart through a warehouse-style supermarket. In the parking lot, she accidentally backs into a tractor-trailer rig driven by Johnny, who, as she notes during her argument with him, looks like a Viking. Following Matty home, we find that she is estranged from her husband, who has moved in with one of his students, and that they have a teen-age daughter who appears and disappears at will. She works behind the counter at the post office, and her most regular customer is the local undertaker, who has a pile of funeral notices to mail out every day.

Johnny shows up at Matty's apartment building to repair the damage done to her car, and she asks him to stay for dinner. As we might predict, she and Johnny drift into an 1-night stand, shortly after which Matty's husband shows up and announces that he wants to reconcile. Matty can't decide what to do, as Johnny pressures her to continue their relationship and her husband begs her to take him back. In the midst of all this, her teenage daughter casually drops a bombshell.

In one sense, the plot is conventional (a little contrived at one point), and I was not happy with the ending, but the strongest point of this movie is the way in which the story is told. Small gestures and facial expressions speak volumes, there is considerable quiet humor, and every person in the movie is a fully-rounded character. Another strong point is that the main character is an older woman, and not a touched-up Diane Keaton older woman but one who looks older than her stated age of 41.