>Despite some detailed insight into the stress of bourgeois German marrieds in early midlife crisis and on the brink of divorce, twentysomething writer-director Lola Randl’s debut feature, “Days in Between,” passes the titular time too ploddingly to engage. As Agnes, a neurology researcher who half-heartedly trysts with a moody widower while her crime-novelist hubby takes extramarital tango lessons and begs in vain for sex, German stage actress Sylvana Krappatsch merely goes through the motions of the character’s curiously passive adventures. Handsome lensing in 35mm won’t boost the melodrama’s prospects far beyond Deutschland.
Pic’s putatively arousing scene has lonely Agnes, surreptitiously catnapping in the bed of her sister’s acquaintance Bruno (Andre Jung), being awakened — and then some — by the momentarily fortunate man of the house. Bruno’s wife, as Agnes discovers by snooping, perished en route to her own affair in Corsica. For no apparent reason, the film opens with a suicide jumper falling under the wheels of the heroine’s car — on her birthday, yet. Film’s remainder, covering the days in between this accident and another, far less eventful driving excursion, is mostly tasteful and tiresome, like Maceij Sledziecki’s string-laden score.
— Rob Nelson
