Hemel

Dutch director Sacha Polak's feature debut sports plenty of nudity—as well as explicit sexual situations and rough language—but it also boasts a sense of artistry. The narrative is essentially a portrait of Hemel (Hannah Hoekstra), a beautiful young woman whose name means “Heaven,” although she is living in a psychological hell, engaging in a stream of one-night stands with men she picks up in nightclubs and bars. Her hedonistic lifestyle appears to stem from her repressed grief over the death of her mother when Hemel was a mere infant, and also her ostensibly pleasant but actually fraught relationship with her widowed father, whose string of brief encounters with younger women ends when he takes up with a co-worker his own age—a woman Hemel finds threatening. The situation grows even darker when Hemel unexpectedly calls on her sanctimonious ex-stepbrother after one of her lovers becomes physically abusive. Thanks to an incisive script, sensitive direction, and a courageous performance by Hoekstra, Hemel emerges as a penetrating study of a young woman on the edge. Recommended for more adventurous foreign film collections. (F. Swietek)