If one takes the plot only, this movie could have been very kitschy. But this was absolutely prevented by the director, and by the camera-work.
At first there are some moody shots of Berlin in the snow.
Then, at the Dalmatian coast, there's a dark and stormy feeling about the black-and-white-images,with dark broken clouds, sometimes a high wind, and big waves beating the rocks of the small island, on which van Eyck lives all for himself, with his two dogs and one goat.
Set against these rather dark, lonely and stormy images are the personality and looks of Elke Sommer, sexy and attractively self-conscious, using these attributes to lift van Eyck out if his seemingly moody states of mind. At first she does this only because she's paid for it...
There's one scene where van Eyck and Elke Sommer talk directly to the camera, to the viewer, as they sometimes did in films of the French 'nouvelle vogue', at the same time period.
The director Jovan Zivanovic made many films in former Yugoslavia(he died in 2002 in Belgrad), and elsewhere one viewer commented on one of his social dramas from Yugoslavian times, remarking that Zivanovic never got the critical attention he would have been entitled to.
