Soldate Jeannette

Austrian director Daniel Hoesl's austere Soldate Jeannette stars Johanna Orsini-Rosenberg as Fanni, a spoiled, upper-middle-class Viennese woman who watches with stoic indifference as her bourgeois existence slowly crumbles all around her. Fanni hasn't paid her rent in years and now faces eviction, but she's determined not to let the hard realities of her shrinking world penetrate the privileged bubble that she's clearly lived in for years. After being evicted from her apartment, Fanni embarks on a long hike in the mountains, where she proceeds to burn what (one presumes) is the last of her cash savings. And then she's working in a meat processing plant, striking up an amorous relationship with one of her female coworkers—suddenly reborn as a countercultural meat-processing lesbian (or something like that). Hoesl has fashioned some sort of anti-capitalist, back-to-nature cinematic meditation here that is somewhat incoherent and not as thought-provoking as it clearly aspires to be. Optional. (M. Sandlin)