“Exterior Noise,” a sleepy tour round Vienna and Berlin, is the third function from the indie director Ted Fendt (“Classical Interval”), and his first to happen largely in Europe. Its focal characters are younger ladies listlessly pursuing varied, indeterminate inventive callings. Fendt is extra fascinated about tracing the structure of their ennui than contemplating its trigger or penalties, and the film observes their leisure with a heat gaze.
We spend most of our time with Daniela (Daniela Zahlner), a literary sort a fan of flowing linen clothes and messy buns. Pure gentle filters into her petite Vienna flat, the place she suffers insomnia by night time and aimlessness by day. The film begins with Daniela as a New York Metropolis vacationer. Upon her return to Europe, she stays along with her pal Mia (Mia Sellmann) in Berlin, the place Daniela reads perched on a windowsill, strolls the town and meets Mia’s graduate-school classmate, Natascha (Natascha Manthe), who asks Daniela, maybe inappropriately, to lend her some cash.
This will sound just like the beginnings of a plot, however “Exterior Noise” hardly revisits the episode. Whereas Fendt beforehand powered movies with awkward humor, right here the temper is ruminative. (Alongside Fendt, Zahlner, Sellmann and Manthe are credited as writers.) Fendt shoots on beautiful 16-millimeter and 35-millimeter movie, and the film’s texture, together with the ladies’s musings, at instances recall a number of female-led options from the late Nineteen Seventies and early ’80s: “Girlfriends,” “Smithereens” and “Selection.” Though much less vibrant than these predecessors, Fendt’s movie is equally dedicated to capturing the aura of an unbiased metropolis dweller discovering her means.
Exterior Noise
Not rated. In English and German, with subtitles. Operating time: 1 hour 1 minute. In theaters.