That was an excellent one.

To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

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.

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.

Charlotte rents a secret apartment. She lives with Max and their son Benjamin in Brussels. She's a researcher professor and she takes some of her male patients to the secret apartment to have sex. She encounters one of those men later and violently attacks him. She goes to therapy with Max and she loses her license to practice. Next, they're in India with the new addition of twins but it's not as good as it first appears to be.There is little dialog especially with the large number of sex scenes. It's a quiet movie. My main problem with that is the lack of emotions for much of the movie. Sandra Hüller plays the cold lead character. She never really lets the audience into the character. Nanouk Leopold is the writer/director. In between the sex scenes, this is a character study movie but it doesn't necessary do a good job. There are little snippets of insight but a whole lot of nothing.

'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.