An official selection at both Sundance and Tribeca, Fraulein had me tentatively interested. Intimate foreign dramas about women are not typically my brew of joe, but I’m always open to expanding my horizons. Unfortunately, director Andrea Staka’s portrait of post-Belgrade life in Switzerland did nothing to dissuade me of my disinterest in the genre (if intimate foreign dramas about women could be considered such).

Ruza (Mirjana Karanovic) lives an icy life in Zurich. Alone and lonely, she runs her modest cafeteria like a drill sargent and counts her money like a Scrooge. The canteen is cold and inhospitable, fluorescent lights casting deep shadows under sterile formica; basically, her personality in restaurant form. Enter Ana (Marija Skaricic), stage right, a refugee from Sarajevo who’s paradigm for living life clashes sharply with Ruza’s. Since Fraulein is content to reside firmly in the melodramatic, it isn’t hard to imagine where this is going. The women will first be at odds but will gradually warm to one another; a crisis will bind them together; Life Lessons will be learned.

Fraulein does have moments of heartfelt comedy. After pinching her pennies one evening, Ruza is horrified to leave her office and discover that crepe paper vandals have invaded her beloved cafeteria. Livid with rage, she shouts at them to get out, only to discover that they are throwing a surprise birthday party for her. Watching anger give way to shock before arriving at confused shyness is quite the entertaining spectacle and a testament to Karanovic’s talent as an actress.

Mirjana Karanovic as Ruza and Marija Skaricic as Ana.

The performances are naturalistic and uniformly great, but that is not where my complaint lies. Fraulein feels like a 45 minute short film that was padded out in order to hit feature length status (the running time is a spare 81 minutes). Nothing really happens, and while that is a pitiful, amateurish critique in and of itself, the characters and filmmaking skills on offer are not enough to retain interest, making the emaciated plot that much more skeletal in comparison. When the film abruptly ends, you can’t help but wonder where the last 15 minutes went. I’m not looking for Terms of Endearment levels of catharsis, but give me some kind of payoff. Even Mike Leigh, famous for his non-plots, understands that much.

As an intimate portrait of Croats and Serbs interacting in an inhospitable Swiss landscape, Fraulein works well enough, and I am willing to admit that most of the political and racial subtleties went sky-high over my head. But without a primer on Croat-Serb relations as they exist in bordering European countries sitting in front of you (the film gives you no help there), Fraulein has little to offer.