Director; Emily Atef (Germany). Year of Release: 2023
Summer 1990, Thüringen, East Germany. Maria’s mother has lost her factory job following unification and her father is preparing to marry a 21-year old Russian, so Maria is living with her boyfriend Johannes’s extended family in a farm. Johannes has a ratty moustache and aspires to studying photography at an art school in Leipzig. When Maria reads to him from the Brothers Karamazov, he doesn’t look like he’s paying much attention.
Maria is 19, and should be still going to school, but half of her teachers have fled to the West, and the rest of them don’t seem very bothered. Instead she spends most of her time reading – either in bed, or sat outside. Unlike Johannes, who has just passed his Abi (German “A” levels), Maria is not overly bothered about completing her education. In fact, she’s not really bothered about doing anything much.
The new political situation weighs on most aspects of their lives. Johannes and Maria drive to Munich, playing music on the old-fangled tape recorder they carry in their car. In Bavaria, they stare in wonder at the CDs on sale, and Johannes buys himself a camera. Johannes’s uncle Hartmut comes to visit and meet his family for the first time in years. He brings his West German wife and talks about the benefits of capitalism.
When Maria’s mother’s Trabant goes careering off the road, she comes into contact with Henner, a local farmer. Henner has two snarling dogs and has stepped straight out of a DH Lawrence novel. He is a horse breeder (metaphor ahoy!) and 40 – more than twice as old as Maria, older than her mother even. Henner and Maria have brutal sex on regular intervals. This leads her to increasingly repel Johannes’s attempts to get close, and to wear neck scarves to hide the bruises.
I have pretty much told you everything that happens in a film which I’m going to refer to as Irgendwan… to save space. There is a lot of brooding, plenty of bodice ripping, but very little in the way of anything actually happening. Henner occasionally reads out poetry and more often drinks, Even more regularly he either has sex with Maria or treats her violently – often both at the same time. Every so often they fall out, and then find their way back to each other.
Apart from the early references to the way in which Eastern Germany was ruined by reunification at least as much as it was by Stalinism, there is little here that you wouldn’t find in your average Mills and Boons novel. Few attempts are made to explain anyone’s motivation or to excuse the abusive behaviour on display. It is deemed sufficient to present a tall brooding farmer and a young woman of an inappropriate age who is besotted with him.
Irgendwann… has the pace of a film which has been based on a novel, and I most definitely do not mean this in a good way. Books and films have a quite different rhythm to each other. Whereas a novel has the freedom to meander, to set the scene, it is a very rare film which is able to hold its audience while nothing is happening. And yet, I can’t remember being in a film when so often the room lit up with someone checking their phone to see just how much longer we had to go.
Instead of exposition, we had endless shots of corn fields, which got very tiring very quickly. Apparently the book contains long passages of introspective self-examination of the narrator, Maria. There is little of this in the film . Instead we get the chance to watch not very interesting people interact with each other in ways that fail to engage us on any level. In a film which lasts way over 2 hours, it is hard to understand why we should be bothered about just about any of this.
This is all a big shame, as Emily Atef’s previous film, Three Days in Quiberon was highly engaging. Here she seems to have taken a big step backwards. Maybe I’m not the target audience – in fact, I know I’m not the target audience, but maybe there are people out there who love this sort of shit. I just couldn’t find anywhere to start, and I must admit that one of the phones regularly lighting up the cinema was mine. The first time I checked my clock, the film wasn’t even half way through.
The best I could say was that after a long wait it finally came to an end. And this is where irony starts to hit. Over the end credits they played an astounding acoustic version of Patti Smith’s Dancing Barefoot. So, as most people rushed out to continue the lives that they’d sacrificed to watch this dross, I stayed till the end. Tip for anyone who is considering seeing this: if you show up after about 130 minutes (plus adverts), you’ll see pretty much everything you need to.
CinePhil 