Director: Lukas Nathrath (Germany). Year of Release: 2023
Hanover, the fag end of Corona times. Characters wear masks, greet each other by bumping elbows, and use disinfectant excessively. But it is once more possible to invite a few people round to dinner. As Lisa has just got a job at Berlin’s biggest hospital, she and her musician partner Clemens are holding a farewell party for some of their closest friends. What with that and the packing, Clemens should be busy, but we first see him struggling to write a song for Lisa on his acoustic guitar.
Lisa arrives with all sorts of complaints and orders. Why hasn’t Clemens unpacked the bookcase yet? Isn’t he aware that the party is starting in 2 hours? Can he go and carry up her shopping? While he is grappling with the shopping bags, one of them splits and everything falls to the ground. A passing young woman helps him pick everything up, and lends him a bag so he can take everything back upstairs. As he is leaving, she asks if she can borrow his phone, saying she has a family emergency.
When Lisa comes down to see what’s taking him, Clemens is standing helplessly, while Valerie, the young woman, is walking up and down the street berating whoever is on the other end of the phone. Under pressure from Lisa, Clemens tentatively tries to take his phone back. When that doesn’t work, Lisa snatches it away. When Valerie asks if she couldn’t load her phone battery in their flat, Clemens first seems to acquiesce before Lisa makes it clear that she’s doing no such thing.
Lisa starts making the vegetarian lasagne, but realises that she’s out of flour. When Clemens insists that there was none in the shopping, she sends him out to buy some more. On the steps, he meets Katharina, a neighbour who they’ve never met, even though they’ve been living in the house for 2 years. Clemens asks Katharina if she has any flour, and when she asks him what sort of flour they need, he dithers and once more looks on hopelessly while Lisa sorts things out.
Clemens talks on skype to a bandmate who tells him he can’t make the party because he’s already left for Cologne. Meanwhile, Lisa’s oldest friend Nadja arrives early, carrying a huge bottle of gin. Nadja has just started working in alternative medicine, and can just feel the disapproval felt by Lisa, who’s a proper doctor. After swigging most of the gin, Nadja has a crisis of confidence and decides that she’s not staying for the party after all, despite her old friend begging her to stay.
While Clemens is skype-ing and Lisa is talking her friend down, the lasagne Is over-cooking and is ruined. No problem. They’ll just ring up a delivery service to bring some food. But the delivery guy needs paying in cash. Clemens has none, and Lisa is in the shower. As Lisa goes to try and find some money, the delivery guy goes into the toilet for a much-needed shit. While he’s there he manages to break a vase, which he smuggles out while Clemens and Lisa are trying to sort out the food.
The guests start to arrive. There’s Lisa’s irritating half-brother Aaron who is in advertising, Jan who used to study with Lisa and obviously still fancies her, and Marcel, an acting friend of Clemens, who has just been sacked from the theatre for a “provocative” piece where he got naked and started getting aggressive with members of the audience. Valerie and Katharina also reappear and remind Clemens that he had invited them to the party, although he was only just being polite.
Jan comes on to Lisa, Marcel gets annoyed by everyone mocking his Austrian accent, and Aaron swaps advertising in jokes with Katharina. At different times, various people remind Clemens that he has recently had a nervous breakdown which caused him to be hospitalised. At one time, he nearly loses it and curls up in the foetal position in the bath. But rather than sympathetic, the others denounce him for being a dangerous lunatic.
Have you ever been to a party and found that it’s full of people who you … well you don’t hate them exactly, as hatred is too strong an emotion to respond to their blandness? You just sit in the corner enduring their company as you wait for the time when it’s socially acceptable to go home. Of course you have, everyone has – and if you haven’t, you’re probably the one that everyone was barely tolerating. But at least you didn’t try to film your dreary evening and inflict it onto anyone else.
What is notable about Letzter Abend is how little most of it really matters. Clemens’s depression is real, but does it really matter if the lasagne burns, especially if you can just order an expensive substitute? Is a broken vase such a problem when your father is paying your rent? Is the self-important preening of an actor really that interesting? I guess that we may be supposed to be laughing at Marcel, not with him, but to be honest, there’s not much funny for us to laugh at.
Apparently, this is supposed to be a biting satire on Generation Y, which I guess may work for people who are in Generation Y, or even know what Generation Y is (don’t tell me. I really don’t care). If the film is anything to go by, Generation Y consists of self-absorbed rich yuppies (is that still a thing?) who are so busy getting angsty about their own tiny problems that they are completely unaware of what’s happening out there in the real world. This is a film which personifies First World Problems.
A little lip service is paid to real political discussion. Phrases like “toxic masculinity” and “gender” are thrown around, though no-one who is using these words seems to have much awareness of what they mean. The one possible exception is Valerie, who is awfully worried about racist street names, but she is no more grounded in ordinary society than anyone else. Her rootless backpacking looks like a poor little rich girl who is looking for attention.
Some critics loved Letzter Abend. It may not be a coincidence that some critics are self-absorbed Generation Y yuppies. For me, it wasn’t a film about me or anyone I know, for which I’m eternally grateful.
CinePhil 