A few minutes into Christoph Rainer short, "Pitter Patter Goes My Heart", female protagonist and shop-keeper Lisa tells a customer that love "is something private
something one keeps for himself". This, we are told, is what she's been doing for nearly five years. She's fallen in love with Alf, a photographer who used to take her kite-flying, told her he loved her, and then left her. Unable to overcome the loss and let go of him, she has been mending her broken heart by filling her room with pictures of her beloved and greeting cards from the gift shop she works at. She could be anywhere between her twenties and thirties, but her unrequited love seems to have kept her a child, and got her to live in this fairy tale Amélie Poulain-esque world which seamlessly shifts from dreams to reality.
Should this be all there is to it, "Pitter Patter Goes My Heart" would probably go down as a standard story of unreciprocated love. But it is not. For Rainer intelligently writes and directs Lisa's pain with a style that is at once delicate and humorous, juxtaposing pain with moments of sheer surrealism and wit.
When the news that Alf is coming back to town for a photoshoot breaks out, Lisa does everything she can to set up a rendezvous. Yet this is no standard photoshoot, as Alf has been hired by a pool of doctors to take pictures of elderly patients sporting severe varicose veins. Lisa's father, a former alcoholic affected by a nasty looking venous disease, appears to be the perfect candidate. After a selection committee declares his veins to be sufficiently swollen, Lisa's father is invited to the photoshoot, and the young woman will have the chance to see just how much things between her and Alf have changed.
The juxtaposition of the fairy tale-like cosmos Lisa inhabits with the world of the venous disease industry is what makes "Pitter Patter Goes My Heart" stand out as memorable work. The clash between the two worlds makes for some scenes which appear have escaped from a Monty Python comedy sketch. But the contrast does more than just stir laughter. It also very brightly highlights the insurmountable gap which separates Lisa's idyllic world with the revolting truth she has to live up to. The brutality of way in which her romance with Alf has ended is shown just as shamelessly as her father's swollen veins. This is not just witty – it is also an intelligent move which strengthens the sense of empathy one feels for Lisa.
Rainer seems to stylistically reproduce the juxtaposition between hopes and reality by alternating different directing devices. There are moments where the camera seems to nod at the Nouvelle Vague, adding several jump cuts to the same scene, others where a tracking shot and the sound of drums remind one of Iñárritu's "Birdman", and a final gliding take showing Lisa's seemingly floating above a street that resembles one of Spike Lee's sequence in "The 25th Hour". The stylistic mélange feels a tad self- referential and threatens to break the film's flow in a few occasions. Even so, the end result is a brave cinematic experience. "Pitter Patter Goes My Heart" is a love story directed in a way that pays justice to the complexity of the private world where all love stories unfold. A personal universe which Rainer intelligently portrays as a surreal, painful, grotesque and heart-warming place.
