Director: Chris Kraus (Austria). Year of Release: 2023
The opening credits give us a quote: “Forgiveness means giving up on every hope of a better past.” Following the quote, we move straight to a Christian re-socialising group where a dark haired woman is making a scene. At one point, she storms out of the circle and looks to be about to leave the room. Instead, she moves to the portable organ at the end of the room and starts playing it beautifully.
Jenny has recently been released from prison for a crime she didn’t commit. As the film develops we learn that 15 years ago, her then-boyfriend’s father died of multiple stab wounds. The boyfriend was let off. As he was a minor, he was allowed to continue a life of anonymity. Jenny, on the other hand, was sent down, cutting short her potential career as a Wunderkind pianist. She still seethes with rage at the injustice of it all, and often finds it difficult controlling her temper.
Now, Jenny is paying her bills by working as a cleaner. One of the places she has to clean is the music school where she once made sensational performances 15 years ago. It is here that she meets Mangold, a contemporary of hers who wasn’t quite as good as her in competition (he claims he came second to her, she says it was more like fourth of fifth). Mangold is now working in the music business and is still deeply impressed by Jenny’s talent.
Mangold has the idea of teaming Jenny up with a Syrian refugee Omar, who played piano in the rubble of his home town before ISIS took an axe, first to his piano, then to his arm. Mangold appoints himself their agent and registers them for a new television talent show for disabled artists. Omar qualifies due to his handlessness, and Mangold reckons that Jenny is sufficiently psychically disturbed to qualify as mentally disabled.
This is satire, right? Right? Many critics thought so, and certainly the show does reflect the way in which TV formats scrape the bottom of the barrel in the search for a new format. And yet it is played so straight that, for me at least, as the film encourages us to invest in Jenny and Omar, all satire disappears. It is not long before they are performing a bland MOR song to an audience which is holding lit mobile phones aloft, and it seems that we are actually supposed to find this good.
At first, Jenny and Omar do not click and Omar decides to work instead with a blind Japanese pianist. But, for reasons which are never entirely credible, Jenny and Omar fall in love, and she adapts some of the classical tunes which he wrote on the Syrian streets. By the time they approach the semi-finals of the competition, Jenny is openly describing Omar’s new tunes as “schmaltzy”. But again, we are still encouraged to deceive ourselves that they are worth listening to.
The talent show is hosted by Gimmemore, a bleach-blond pop star who now performs similarly bland songs to an enthusiastic young audience. We gradually learn that Gimmemore is Jenny’s renamed ex-boyfriend, who once was in a punk band with her, but has now become despairingly mainstream. Although Jenny rises an eyebrow at this, it feels like this is portrayed as being a symptom of her uncontrolled rage rather than a response to the moral degradation of selling out.
Gimmemore has a baby with another woman to replace the one which Jenny lost in childbirth. He is also trying to come to terms with contracting leukaemia, which positions him as a somewhat sympathetic character to the audience. At times, Jenny seems to show a desire to reunite with her old love. At others she tells him to fuck off on the tv set. But whatever her mixed emotions, it becomes increasingly clear that she still wants revenge.
Ultimately, 15 Jahre is trying to do some interesting things, and Hannah Herzsprung is wonderfully sullen as Jenny, who is – initially at least – quite unlike a traditional romantic lead. Her hair is lank and she spends most of her time scowling and picking a fight with anyone who comes close. But the film is trying to do these interesting things in a format which is so deadeningly conservative that more often than not it doesn’t quite work.
There is too little interesting in a standard love story of a pair who are initially antagonistic then fall into each other’s arms. And while early scenes showing Jenny’s surliness show great potential, the more the romance with Omar takes centre stage, the less interesting she becomes as a character. It may very well not be the film’s intention, but we increasingly watch a feisty character being lured into the straight-jacket of a conventional romcom heroine.
It is also great to have a leading figure who is a Syrian refugee, and the scenes of Omar playing piano in the ruins of a bombed out Syrian city are very moving. But there are too many well-worn cultural signifiers (ISIS, arranged marriage to a woman in a headscarf) which make him much more of a stereotype than he needs be. This is unfortunately typical of a film in which no cliché is left unturned, and unsurprising bog-standard romcom plotting drives it to its inevitable end
There are just too many coincidences for the dramatic tension to really be effective. To paraphrase another bleach blond punk, you get the feeling that you’ve been cheated. Nonetheless there is enough here to retain our interest, and the acting is first rate. 15 Jahre could have been a good film, and it is certainly based on an interesting premise. Going to see it isn’t a complete waste of time, but you leave with a feeling that it could have been much, much better.
CinePhil 