A small desolate house somewhere in the Alps consists out of a family of four: father, mother, their deaf teenage son Bub, and teenage daughter Belli who teaches Bub how to spell and write. They feed pigs and chickens on the farm and try to manage their finances. Bub is acting more and more erratic. When the lawn mower shuts down and Bub throws it off the cliff, the father gets angry and Bub hides in the mountains from fear. Belli brings Bub food and they sleep together and have sex. Then they return back to the house. When Belli finally admits to mom she is pregnant with Bub, the father takes a rifle and aims it at Belli, but Bub intervenes and in the chaos the father is shot. The mother quickly dies, too. Bub burries their corpses in the snow and now leads the house with Belli.
Ranked in a local poll by film critics as the best Swiss movie of the 20th century, Fredi M. Murer's "Alpine Fire" is a 'raw', astringent and unglamorous ethnographic incest drama that plays with a combination of several disparate elements—it has both slow and powerful images, and is both minimalist and expressionistic at times. Filmed on only one location of the house on the mountains and featuring only four people (except for one brief excursion in which the family descends down to visit grandmother and grandfather at their house), the story slowly builds up a feeling of isolation which is embodied in the deaf protagonist Bub who feels sexual frustration, pressure, discomfort and a need for some relief. He acts peculiar, nervous, and seemingly incomprehensible, such as when he throws his sister Belli's radio in the water or when he lies on the ground to play with little pigs on the farm. Murer has a sense for aesthetic images supported by the stunning Alpine landscapes—for instance, the unusual frame of the father mowing the meadow on the highly steep hill or the tracking shot of Bub running across the long stone wall.
The middle of the film, where a "fugitive" Bub in nature is visited by Belli who gives him food from the house, is highly poetic and subtle: they hug and fondle during the night, the fire burns, and then there is a wonderful, cathartic scene of their blanket on the meadow with a mountain in the background. Did the sex between the brother and sister happen suddenly? Not really, since there were subtle clues before—one scene at 45 minutes into the film indicates already something. In the first half of the film, the pressure is all on Bub—whereas in the second half, the pressure is all on the rest of the family, after the incest "twist". Nothing is presented as black and white, and Murer shows understanding for the shortcomings his characters found themselves in, so that even the brute father is not a real villain—in two seperate sequences, the grandmother tells to Belli everything about both the father ("Many nights your mother cried because of Franz's mother. She ruled the house till the end. All the children left home quickly. Franz was the youngest so he had to stay, engaged for 15 years. She didn't let another woman near as long as she lived") and Bub ("Nobody is to blame. For three years nobody noticed that he didn't hear. When he was small he laughed and screamed like all children"). It's an uncomfortable topic, but done with a lot of comfortable humanism, and as difficult it is to start watching this film—the longer it lasts, the more engaging it gets.
Grade:+++
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