User Reviews

I found this film unsettling and unsatisfying--but that is exactly the point! For it deals with a character so flawed, one must accept the uncomfortable reality that these profound personal deficits will never (realistically) be resolved.

Which leads the husband to ask the pivotal question in the entire film: "But is it enough?" Clearly he is in great pain as he wrestles with this quandary in which he finds himself stuck.

Max married this woman who APPEARED to be a highly successful, beautiful woman physician. But marrying across different cultural lines can be tricky to ascertain authentic personality vs. unfamiliar social customs. When newly in love, we have a blind spot to deficits in our partner and easily rationalize them away.

Sadly, this woman's actions--and subsequent reactions--reveal her personality has suffered from arrested development. She is a Narcissist who doesn't care how her actions affect those who love her. Gratifying her ego trumps all other considerations.

She never makes ONE display of empathy or compassion--not once does she even frown or show appropriate discomfort (while her husband cries in bed..). Her affect and behavior are HIGHLY abnormal. (Also, note that she is NOT primarily a clinical MD, but rather a researcher; this has allowed her deficit in compassion to slip through the cracks).

It's a social statement on how highly we value physical beauty and academic achievement--so much we might miss the person inside is incompletely formed(!).

In the final scenes, her husband realizes the extent of her deficits and must weigh two traumatic alternatives: leaving her (mother of his three children) or staying with her (denying him a compassionate, sensitive partner he desperately wants and needs).

It's a very grim prospect for Max, and he knows it. Coming from a traditional Indianbackground, I infer that he will choose to stay with her for the sake of children and social pressure.

The film leaves us somehow feeling "ripped off" and unsatisfied as viewers--but this is by design because they mirror Max's reality. There will be no resolution of the core problem, only a lifetime of painful coping. Ultimately, he will have to decide if indeed "it is enough"---or not.

I like artsy films for the simple reason that they make me think. And Brownian Movement's point to ponder is, I believe, what sort of mental illness creates such a closed personality as Sandra Huller's character. At least, that's what I think it is. Such a study requires character development and dialogue that leads to discover exactly what makes the lead character tick. Instead of dialogue we are treated to long silences between characters or without characters in empty bedrooms or bathrooms. Whatever dialogue exists is in such basic English or French that it made me wonder if the scriptwriter was fluent in either language.

Any action that takes place between the sterile room or scenery shot is similarly sterile. The sex scenes are so devoid of feeling that they can only be classed as porn and not well made porn at that. The only compliment I can pay part 1, where most of the sex takes place, is that it answers a burning question that must be on every movie-goer's mind: Do German actresses have Brazilians? If Sandra Huller is a typical example, apparently not.

Not recommended unless you need to experience terminal boredom.

Maybe the acting and cinematography is great but the story line is stupid. Here is another marriage where the wife is a wacko sex freak and the spineless husband just stands by in therapy sessions like a prime cuckold. Love might be a factor in some marriages, but not in this one.

BTW, the therapy sessions we see, were for her evaluation to continue her job as a research doctor, which she ends up getting fired and losing her license to practice. We never see them continue the therapy for addressing her problems. Hence, another cuckold relationship.

The film was recommended to me on Tubi so I had no idea what it was about going into it. First of all, it is an Art House film with little dialog, and if either of those things turn you off you can skip this review and the movie.

The movie opens with Charlotte renting an apartment and paying quite a large sum for it in cash. Next we learn that Charlotte is a very successful doctor, researcher & teacher with a great a family, including a great looking husband! Next we see Charlotte walking up and down the hall of her research facility looking at patients and eventually choosing one to take back to her apartment, which we now know is obviously her love den, and has sex with the patient. This theme repeats itself as we see Charlotte take many patients back to her bachelorette pad. Where the name of the movie seems to come into play here is that she is randomly selecting these men, hence the name the Brownian Movement, technically The Brownian Motion. The men Charlotte selects are all the antithesis of her very handsome husband with one being bald, one very hairy, one obese and a very old man. But are they truly random?

Eventually Charlotte is caught cheating and violating medical ethics by having sex with her patients and is ordered to undergo a court mandated psych eval/marriage counseling with her husband. In the final counseling session, Charlotte is asked why she did this by her husband and the psychiatrist and just when we think we are going to learn why? Charlotte says " I think it is better If I don't say why? But if you were paying attention, which I was, Charlotte appears to have a tactile compulsion, in that she is satiated by different textures and touch sensations, those seem to be what drives her behavior. We first see this in the opening scene in the apartment when Charlotte, in a short silk robe, spreads a blanket out on the bed and sits on it. She appears very frustrated while sitting on the blanket and then pulls her robe up so her bare bottom is now on the blanket and sense of calm comes over her. She lays back on the blanket and gently rubs the back of her hand across the blanket, which we see has a very distinct texture to it.

The men Charlotte selected are all offer that same tactile sensation she seeks. We see her stroking and touching the body hair of the very hirsute man. Later she plays with the belly of the obese man. During that same encounter we see Charlotte lying nude on carpet gently stroking carpet fibers when the obese man lies on top of Charlotte, not in a sexual way, but rather for Charlotte to experience the feeling of his weight upon her. The saggy skin of the old man again offers another unique tactile sensation for her.

The compulsion is not just related to men, we see Charlotte visiting buildings under construction and lying on the concrete structures rubbing the concrete with her hands with the same calm she experienced on the blanket.

Charlotte is eventually disbarred and her and her husband move to another country and magically have two more children, that was a bit of a disconnect, but we are to believe her and her husband have reconciled. While Charlotte appears to have overcome her compulsion with men, she is still distanced from her husband and he begins to believe she is cheating on him, again. He follows her one day expecting to find her with another man, but instead finds her in a building under construction sitting against the concrete wall seemingly in rapture. The husband actually feels jealous of the joy she finds with inanimate objects, but ultimately deals with it.

The movie was a very interesting/deep character study of a person with a unique affliction, but cutting down on all the scenes with little dialog could have made the film shorter and ultimately better.

In the Forties radio dramas used to use up allotted time with dramatic music passages, or by having lengthy walking scenes or stage business that didn't really advance the story or develop characters ("Here's the doorbell. I'll just ring it. Should I ring it again?"). Apparently the director of The Brownian Movement discovered the cinematic version of this. Have a movie 96 minutes long with very little dialogue and almost no action. Even the sex scenes were static, stopping just short of being still photographs; uninspired, photographs at that.

There is the potential here for a story: Woman with handsome husband has an unaccountable fetish for sleeping with unattractive men. Unfortunately that story wasn't presented in this movie. Instead we have dreadful, unending scenes of people looking thoughtful. Not pained. Not horrified. Not terrified. Just thoughtful. Maybe they're bored. I can see why they might be.

Here is a fundamental truism of fiction: Your characters need to have a motivation for their behavior. It can be concealed for a while and unveiled suddenly or gradually, but ultimately your characters have to have reasons for behaving as they do. Not in this film.

I tried to discern what most of the budget for this movie went into. Obviously it was Ms. Huller's salary. The rest of this pretentious nonsense couldn't have cost more than a few thousand dollars for plane tickets. There were no tricky or interesting camera shots; just painful drawn-out shots of nice interiors (maybe some money was spent on hiring locations). Since there was nothing going on, and not much said, the need for a crew was probably minimal. We're supposed to think of this as arty and deep. No it was someone's way of getting someone (a government agency?) to finance a film that has no substance and doesn't do anything.

I assume someone pocketed the money saved from not buying a real screenplay or hiring sound stages where real action could be filmed, or a sound person, or a makeup person, or much of anything else, for that matter. It is surprising that a movie which showed so much of Ms. Huller's attractive epidermis could be so excruciatingly dull and silly. It is so stultifying that her nudity can't save it.

Insufferable longueurs that test the patience to breaking point, posing as artiness. Complete failure to supply backstory so that we actually know nothing about the characters while pretending to think about them. Baffling behaviour by a medical doctor --- well, that's understandable enough, considering what they endure to achieve their licence. But that behaviour is never explained, and the character says smugly that to explain "would only make it worse". Since she had sexual intercourse with men selected from her hospital's patients, she loses her licence to practice and she and her man and their children head off to India, where nothing further happens at all. I could not understand why they spoke English, in rather sketchy accents, and why the French in the movie was not subtitled. The whole thing was so anti-audience and so extremely uningratiating that I felt totally uninvolved and not motivated to watch, which is a feeling evidently shared by the vast majority of humanity. How can someone do this to European cinema? How could the Dutch pay for it?

She's a wife, a mother, and a career woman. She also sleeps with ugly guys in this secretly rented apartment. When all comes out, she loses everything. The story reminds me of Machado's The Husband Stitch: both women aren't left with anything outside the roles ascribed to them, so they create these bizarre prosthetic spaces if only to have them at their disposal. I wonder (not) what the verdict would have been if husband and wife switched places though; would a male adulterer have been proclaimed a victim of societal expectations... Yeah, these are my thoughts and I find them interesting, but the movie itself wasn't very good at conveying its message; to be honest, I was pretty bored.

As usual, I know nothing but the title (and sometimes who's in it) of the films I'm gonna watch, not even genre, but with this one, I also saw the poster. These days, everything about movies is hugely predictive and spoilerish, so with a title like this, I could sense that it would be a drama, and quite frankly, because of the poster and the likeness of Hüller with Williams, I thought: Aha, some good American Indie drama.

Well, turns out I wasn't too far off, as this was definitely not some mainstream BS for the multiplexes.

Brownian Movement is a very slow study in the exposure of the dark side of a perfectly well adjusted (and I hate that phrase, well-adjusted, there's something terribly Nazi-Orwellian about it) successful medical doctor. The title refers to the phenomenon that molecules in fluids in states of rest still keep moving very slowly. To give you an impression of how slow the movie is, the first shot of the movie is a static shot of a very nice upscale apartment, about a minute long, which is long, if not an eternity, in this age of attention deficit disorders.

It's a film in three episodes and it opens with Charlotte, a very pretty Berlin medical doctor renting an apartment in Brussels, Belgium, the city where she works and lives with her husband, an architect, and their only child.

As it appears, Charlotte rented the apartment in order to have sex with other men, varying from the average to the highly unattractive and obese. Everything is OK, until Charlotte accidentally meets one of her lovers at her husbands place of work and she gets such a fit that she faints. In part two, she goes into therapy (for this?), sometimes even with her husband, while her precise condition is never clearly stated. Eventually, her medical license is revoked (which seems fascist to me, you can get your medical license revoked for sleeping around?? Or, it might be that some of her lovers were her patients as well), and in part three, she, her husband and son, and some new children (twins) are now living in India, where the film ends.

Brownian movement is an extremely understated movie, with sometimes breathtaking cinematography, comprised mostly of static shots. The only moving shots are when the camera is in a car. Otherwise, the film is rather like leafing through someones photo book, with only shots of Charlotte in it. This might be a weakness, the medium is after all, film aka "dem movin' pitchers", and it would be a good thing to have at least some attempt at panning (sweeping) camera shots. The acting, also by the underused Bakema is superb. And of course it's very pleasing to watch the very attractive Hüller, who really does look like Michelle Williams' almost twin sister.

Many things remain unclear, like who is Isaac, in what language do Charlotte and Max declare their love for one another after love making, (it's not English, French or German) and why does Charlotte sleep with all these rather ugly, gross looking men? I mean, obese hairy guy? WTF?

About that, it's nice that the movie doesn't attempt any explanations, other than Charlotte's remark that sleeping with those men and sleeping with her husband are two things which aren't related at all, and that giving an explanation would make things much worse. But it does make one curious. Then again, with movies like these, the room for discussion it leaves, will tell you much about the person you're going to see the movie with ....;)

The biggest question of the movie is, (and what I'm really curious about) if Michelle Williams knows that she has a German twin who is as good of an actress as she is, or better.

8/10 The Melancholic Alcoholic.

'Brownian Movement' consists of beautiful cinematography in individually slow (if at all) moving, contemplative scenes, but there ís a big picture, with a clear narrative. A female doctor who conducts (unspecified) medical experiments with medicines, rents her own personal 'laboratory' to have sex with a number of male patients she picks out at work. She has an attractive husband, but the men she chooses, she picks for their physical details, such as body hair, pockmarkedness or obesity. In three parts she (1) experiments, but when she meets one the 'guinea pigs' at her husband's workplace she reacts with great fear and anger, (2) she sees a psychiatrist with her husband, is deemed unfit to be a doctor for not recognizing her ethical conduct was wrong and (3) she moves with her family to India for their aftermath.

The story seems strange, but maybe we should put that on the 'culprit' here, the woman doctor. Her reaction to accidentally meeting one of the men she had an affair with, is bizarre, but does show how much she had been living inside some sort of bubble up until that moment. Then, the visits to the psychiatrist don't tell us much either, except that, eventually, she is dismissed from her profession for being unethical and not recognizing her mistakes. What if she had never met that man again, I couldn't help but wonder...

The role of Charlotte seems a natural progression for Sandra Hüller after the amazing 'job' she did in 'Requiem'. She is again wonderful here, and Dragan Bakema, though mostly playing a supporting (and less intense) role, did fine, too.

All in all, I really enjoyed this (arthouse) film. The title, I learned elsewhere, is supposed to have been based on the phenomenon Brownian motion, which you can read all about elsewhere on the net. To me, this could have done with a different title, and I didn't see any need for it being divided up into three parts either; it felt like one organic story about a peculiar woman and her troubles in love and life. Keep it simple if that's what it is, I would say. Maybe I've missed some stuff, or maybe I don't care too much about it... or maybe I'll get more of it a next time around, because I'd like to see this one again sometime. Until then, I won't call it pretentious...

A big 8 out of 10.