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Mostly Martha review
:. Director: Sandra Nettelbeck
:. Starring: Martina Gedeck, Maxime Foerste
:. Running Time: 1:45
:. Year: 2002
:. Country: Italy/Germany
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Poor Martha. A fine chef, a beautiful woman, she has no life outside the kitchen. She goes to therapy because her boss makes her go as a condition of her employment. She's got her therapist perplexed; all she does is talk about food and cooking. We see her in action at work: so tightly wound, she cannot handle any complaints from the customers. She slaps a raw steak on the table in front of one customer who was not satisfied with her definition of "rare." If you were the owner of the restaurant, not only would you insist Martha see a shrink, you would pay for her sessions.
Martha (Martina Gedeck) is German; she lives and works in Hamburg, which is lit with a leaden, grey light. Her home is near the waterfront, where there's evidence of German industriousness all around her. But we feel for Martha in her leaden, grey life. We feel her psychic tension, as she tries to cool herself off by taking refuge inside the restaurant kitchen's walk-in refrigerator. Gedeck does a fine job letting us into her mindset, and we squirm in our seats trying to tolerate the intensity of her need for control. She works hard at organizing the kitchen, the cooks, the recipes. She seems successful as she manages to twist together all of the loose threads in her life. Yet she takes no apparent pleasure in anything. She herself doesn't eat much. She just tries to get it all "right." We see her preparing a perfect piece of salmon for herself one night, and having done so, she shows no particular need to eat it. We're surprised by what she does instead: she puts her fork down and runs downstairs to the new neighbor's apartment to offer it to him. Sam, the downstairs man, is a kind and handsome architect, but the movie goes nowhere with him. He is a just a red herring. Martha must wait for the Italian.
Mostly Martha is a love story. When the Italian (played by Sergio Castellito), Mario, enters (he's a second chef hired by the restaurant owner without Martha's knowledge), Martha feels threatened, worried about the potential challenge to her authority, despite Mario's professed admiration of her artistry. He's all that she isn't, of course: full of sensuality, music, humor, there's not an obsessive-compulsive bone in his body. He's Italian. Of course.
The love story happens, and it's not Mario's love that matters so much as that which develops between Martha and her 8 year old niece, Lina (sensitively acted by Maxime Foerste), who becomes her ward after Martha's sister dies in a car accident. It's a struggle for Martha to figure out how to care for the motherless girl, whose grief is palpable. Lina reminds us of Martha, in fact, though we understand why Lina is withdrawn and lifeless and we have no clue as to why Martha's the way she is. Lina rebels, asserting herself in her pain. The only one who seems to be able to help both Martha and Lina is Mario. Only when Martha is faced with the loss of Lina (to another Italian, Lina's father), is she able to reckon with what her own emotional needs are, and she ultimately feeds her face with the some of the goodies of life: love, marriage and family.
This is a kind of post-modernish, minimalistic story that apparently appeals to almost everyone. The foodies certainly enjoy the gastronomic references as well as the scenes in the upscale restaurant with diners who are on first-name bases with the restaurant owner, personalizing their relationship to the famous chef. Yet, the story is sensitively and delicately handled by its edges, like a sheet of phyllo dough, lest the thin (yet rich) fabric of the film fall apart.
The audience in this movie is also delicately handled by the director. We are stretched and teased, seasoned and stirred. And we don't mind much, because there is love in Nettelbeck's hand. She uses music well, an added seasoning that tells us how she wants us to feel. Ultimately, the movie fails to move us as deeply as it might, because though the ingredients are there, they are not used for more than a surface effect. We do get a taste of the pain of these characters, but what happens to them, how they get from A to Z, seems simply due to the magic of love and a warm Mediterranean climate. It's a fairy-tale at the end, without being a fairy-tale in the beginning or middle. Nettelbeck takes this turn and this leaves us perplexed. She's picked out all the ingredients and offered us the potential of a complex, layered feast, but it turns out flat, maybe a strudel, sprinkled with powdered sugar. The German icing has dominated after all, because we're supposed to simply accept that Martha's life has been made gut by the sudden appearance of a warm Italian pasta and a little girl's love.
So, we think we've seen the storybook ending, but we know we're just watching the birth of a dysfunctional family system, because the lady hasn't really changed a whit. Earlier in the movie we see Martha hyperventilating at the sight of her messed-up kitchen, Mario's byproduct in his creation of a sensuous Italian meal. Well, Mario will forever be causing Martha this kind of grief. We can just imagine the fights ahead between them. In the final scene of the movie, Martha is still in therapy, she's gotten her therapist to cook for her now, but she still maintains critical control, figuring out that he's used an inferior grade of sugar. This lady needs a new therapist. Nettelbeck has given us some sensitive moments, understanding how enormously the loss of loved ones can painfully twist a psyche into self-starvation. She may have tapped into a sort of collective unconscious wish, to be made whole by a simple infusion of warmth from the outside. If only wishes were enough. Martha herself has done nothing active to make her life different, and so the movie ends, and we're still hungry.
Carol Saturansky
 Movie Reviews: European Films
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