成人快手

Putting two broken people through the wringer, Danish director Susanne Bier (making her Hollywood debut) gently juices every ounce of emotion from Things We Lost In The Fire. Halle Berry and Benicio Del Toro are more than up to the task, pouring pure soul into this otherwise soapy yarn. Berry stars as the widow struggling to cope with the death of her husband (David Duchovny) and Del Toro plays it equally disorientated as his heroin-addicted best friend.

Bier gives us a dose of that initial bewilderment, flashing back and forth through time to reveal the tragedy that has left Audrey a shell of her former self. She's also faced with having to raise two children alone and quickly feels out of her depth. When her late husband's scruffy pal turns up at the funeral and makes nice with the kids, he isn't so much an angel in disguise as the lesser of two evils. He is utterly frank about his losing war with drug addiction, but Audrey puts him up in the garage anyway and together they take the punches, one day at a time.

"DEL TORO IS ESPECIALLY INTUITIVE"

Cutting tight between the blink of an eye and the vaguest flutter of an eyelash, Bier creates a palpable sense of two characters living moment to moment. Every breath is a battle won. Del Toro is especially intuitive and sometimes disarmingly funny, although it looks as if he's doing nothing at all. His nonplussed expression as Berry invites him to massage her ear lobes (and send her off to sleep) is an amusing hint at the sheer awkwardness of this mutual dependency. Thankfully, Bier doesn't take the obvious route to a happy ending with all this bristling sexual tension, but there are times when the script does give in to cliche. It is the raw power of the acting, and Bier's sensitive framing, which keeps the structure standing.

Things We Lost In The Fire is out in the UK on 1st February 2008.