Director: Hans Steinbichler (Austria, Germany). Year of Release: 2023
The Austrian alps as the 19th Century gradually turns into the 20th. A horse and cart carry a boy along a road. We see a mountain towering in the distance ahead of the cart, and a river to its left. Every so often the scene is disrupted to show the passage of time. The landscape looks slightly different each time. But the horse and cart continues to plod forwards. There is always a mountain towering in front of it, always a river to its left.
Andreas has been orphaned and sent off to stay with relatives. They have little time for him and see him as a burden. We see repeated scenes in which the young Andreas is forced to remove his trousers. As he bends over, we see an upside down version of his approaching tormentor. An improvised whip is produced. We hear the sound of the whip hitting Andreas’s arse once, twice, many times.
Andreas grows up and is replaced by a different actor. He pitches hay and hammers things into a fence. He acquires a spartan hut at the top of the mountain where he tends a small garden. It is an idyllic life, if you idealise hanging around doing nothing. Andreas is taciturn to the point of inarticulacy. He is very withdrawn and spends little time talking to his workmates. He prefers to spend his time in solitude at the top of the mountain.
Andreas starts working erecting pylons for the cable car which, it is announced, will bring electricity to the valley. His new boss offers him the job on three conditions – no alcohol, no whoring, no trade unions. This is not the sort of film in which any of these is very much in evidence. The work is dangerous – you’ll rarely encounter a film featuring so many funerals – but the workers’ deaths are accepted as being par for the course.
One night in the local bar, the barmaid asks Andreas if he wants another drink. Transfixed in his thoughts, he doesn’t answer, but she brings him one anyway. Marie is just as shy and reserved as Andreas, so conversation doesn’t exactly flow, but after a while he invites her back to his hut. On one occasion, Andreas kisses Marie desperately, brutally. The kisses which she returns are much more tender, but you get the feeling that he is all that she feels is available to her.
When Andreas proposes to Marie, they are sat at right angles, neither looking at the other. But what else can she say but “yes”? Soon Marie is living in the hut. I am sure that Andreas and Marie love each other in their own way, but their relationship appears to be devoid of passion or joy. Nonetheless, it is clear that Marie and Andreas share a deep bond. In a very real sense, they are each all that the other has.
One evening, while Andreas is standing outside the hut, an avalanche hits. When he comes to, he is buried beneath a heap of snow and has apparently broken both his legs. He digs himself out and, clawing at the ground with a piece of wood in each hand, crawls arduously and slowly back home. The hut has disappeared, with Marie in it. The village’s overly busy funeral director has another commission.
Marie’s death is obviously a tragedy for Andreas who spends the rest of the film writing letters, which he posts through a hole in her coffin. But Marie never much more than a cypher – at first providing Andreas with a wife, later someone he can grieve over. She is never afforded much of a personality of her own. The film fails the Bechdel test as neither Marie nor the only other woman with a speaking role ever speaks to another woman about anything at all.
Then again, neither woman says much to Andreas either. And, to be fair, the film is equal opportunities in its denial of a voice to its characters. The men rarely talk about anything but work. This is a community which is cut off from the rest of society, which has little to say, even when Big Events impose themselves (we’ll come to that soon). You may find this a quaint discourse on village life. I find it difficult to feel anything for any of the characters.
About two-thirds of the way through, something happens, albeit very briefly. Andreas goes down to the village and sees that the place is covered with red, white and black Nazi flags. He is summoned to the Eastern front where he is captured by Soviet soldiers. Almost immediately afterwards, he’s back at the village and the war is presumably over. Its not long before he’s lost his hair and is played by yet another actor. All this happens within a matter of minutes
Ein ganzes Leben is based on a novel, and boy does it show. I’ve said it before, but film and novels are different disciplines and few stories work well in both media. Tess of the d’Urbervilles, The World According to Garp, Women in Love. After that I’m starting to run out of examples of something which is both a film worth watching and a book worth reading. Brooding contemplation works on the pages of a novel. On screen nothing happening can start to drag very quickly.
Ein ganzes Leben roughly translates as “a full life” or “a whole life”. This is a pretty accurate description of a film which accompanies Andreas from boyhood to – spoiler alert – death. What it does not translate as – not in this case anyway – is an interesting life. Andreas does little to act upon society, not that we see much of society anyway. He lives, he breathes, he works, he dies. Towards this eyes he looks back on what he has achieved in life. To these eyes, he has done very little.
I am sure that this is a film which has an audience, and this may be another example of me being out of synch with all right thinking people. But I just could neither get involved nor care about the plot or characters. This is a film which intrudes upon serious events in world history, and witnesses the casual exploitation of village labour which leads to several deaths, but it has nothing to offer but a shrug. I may be missing a subtle undertone, but this doesn’t feel enough to me.
CinePhil 