All About Anna (2005)

Anna (Gry Bay) is a beautiful woman living in Holland with the man of her dreams, from out of nowhere that man (Johan) heads off on a fishing journey, and fails to return, leaving Anna alone and depressed falling from one sexual encounter to another. Then she meets Frank (Thomas Raft) and she again finds love, but it’s not the same, there is just something missing. When Anna decides to rent a new flat, she opts to take in a lodger in the form of Camilla (Eileen Daly), and it seems on the surface that despite a different type of relationship with Frank, all will be ok; that’s of course until the removal men turn up, and one of those is Johan.

All About Anna is a piece of a film erotica, a love story with some highly steamy scenes, made for women by women. This is a movie that reads like any piece of female-based erotica, it looks at the emotion, but can still have a lot of masculinity about it, in a way that a man might not be able to achieve if handling a similar project.

While the movie works, and has a certain power about it, it’s not entirely a success. Some of the performances are just diabolical, and the narration delivered by Gry Bay is tedious to say the least. In vision it is a thing of perfection, in sound however it simply does not work. A couple of the movies performers Daly especially outshine the other performers, and sadly no amount of beauty in the leading lady is enough to cover he fact that the leading lady, is the weakest link.

Many will be shocked at the level of intimacy exposed in the movie, I suspect for many it will come as a terrible shock. Twenty minutes in and you are greeted by an erect penis, we later have oral sex (in quite graphic detail), lesbian sex, a rather up close and personal ejaculation scene, and a great deal of nudity.

The movie is clearly of a limited budget despite the fact that is country jumps through the film; the picture quality is hazy to say the least. Rather interestingly, at one point in the movie, as the characters of Anna and Camilla chat on the phone, the scene shot from Camilla’s end is actually shot in Daly’s own flat in the UK.

Despite the poor performances of some, and the cheapness of the picture quality, All About Anna is a reasonably compelling story, helped along in part by the great amount of intimacy, it would be hard not to put yourself in some of the situations depicted in the film, a fact that somehow brings the movie home to a viewer in a very personal level, something that many higher budget movies would fail to achieve.