3.5/5 stars “Everything is open,” croaks Javier Bardem’s Leo at the very beginning of Sally Potter’s latest film The Roads Not Taken . This is one of the few coherent things that he says, at least for a while, in a story that explores trauma, mental illness and immigration, among other things. Playing in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, with Elle Fanning, Salma Hayek and Laura Linney co-starring, this is arguably Potter’s starriest vehicle since The Man Who Cried with Johnny Depp and Cate Blanchett 20 years ago. But it’s unmistakably a film by Potter, the British director who has always offered a unique perspective on the human condition. Here, Leo lies in the bed of his grotty apartment in New York in a near-catatonic state. His daughter Molly (Fanning) has come to help, initially by accompanying him to a dental appointment, but his condition – some form of frontotemporal dementia, we later discover – is such that she has little choice but to stay with him, despite a growing work crisis of her own. Divorced from Molly’s embittered mother (Linney), Leo has been living in the US for 30 years, having crossed the border from Mexico. But as this hard-to-watch deterioration becomes more acute across the course of this brisk 85-minute film, he begins to hallucinate. Using this device, Potter daringly introduces us to two crucial moments in Leo’s past, jumbled in his mind as memory and fantasy collide. We have his time on a Greek island, where he aspires to be a writer – so much so, he abandoned his baby daughter. We also meet Dolores (Hayek), his “childhood sweetheart” back in Mexico with whom he has suffered imaginable pain. What is truth? What is fiction? What is projection or guilt? It takes a while to unpick, and Potter’s jigsaw-like structure sometimes obscures meaning. Throughout, there are fine performances. Stripped of so much dialogue, Bardem is the stand-out, with those hooded eyes of his telling so much of this story as he wanders New York like a lost child. Fanning is also excellent as the kindly daughter who just wants to see her father back again. “I just don’t know what you’re saying,” she says at one point, and you may feel the same, given Leo’s often incomprehensible mutterings. But through it all, there’s a potent portrayal of the bond between a parent and a child, and how it can never be taken for granted. Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook