Salmonberries

Adlon wrote this slight, quirky but often moving film for singer-songwriter kd lang. Shot in English, set partly in the icy wastes of Alaska, partly in the wintry former no man's land of a newly reunified Berlin, it casts her as an orphaned Eskimo who hides his/her gender beneath layers of baggy clothes, and his/her emotional emptiness behind the scowling face of a Wild Child. Zech plays an exiled and widowed German librarian who befriends her and comes to terms, through their edgy relationship, with her own familial past. The fragmented early scenes fail to gel, but once lang lures Zech out of the warm interior of her cabin into the magical, frozen landscape, lang's haunting theme song ('Barefoot') helps to establish a more consistent, engaging tone. During a subsequent visit to Berlin, their ambiguous relationship trembles on the edge of lesbian love, but is complicated by Zech's coyness and lang's longing for maternal affection. A minor return to form for Adlon after Rosalie Goes Shopping; but the real praise goes to the two stars for breathing so much human warmth into some chilly scenes of winter.