Personal Baggage (2009)

The breathtaking opening vistas of Personal Baggage, with a choral score to match, give fair but subliminal warning to the audience: this film will twist you and turn you. A talented but spoilt young man smothered in the affection of his adoring mother and heedless of his aloof father; his grandfather, a benevolent but self-important patriarch; and his new girl-friend, a creature of voluptuous innocence wrestling with the torment of a dysfunctional home, are the central characters in this ensemble narrative of strained love and spiralling desire. The masterfully portrayed characters reveal the inexorable issues, or baggage, they bring with them, and ultimately their own baggage becomes a ruinous physical burden. The peripheral, chorus-like characters, including a reclusive painter and her friend, an unworldly man of the woods, provide their own touching story, but offer no redemption. And surrounding the entire film is the remote yet haunting presence of the Slovenian forests, which have been slowly yielding up their own gruesome historical baggage, a subtext that director Janez Lapajne uses to excruciatingly ironic effect.