Directors: Christian Johannes Koch, Jonas Matauschek (Switzerland, Germany). Year of Release: 2023
2018. A montage of blurry-eyed faces motivating themselves to get out of the house. As they leave their respective homes, two of them meet up at a car park. The one who doesn’t have his own car has been already been waiting for half an hour. His mate apologises for sleeping in, but then spends more time than is strictly necessary smoking a cigarette. As the pair continue to bicker, the other one looks on in disgust.
There follow some scenes inside Bottrop, the last hard coal mine in Germany. The men (and one woman, we’ll come to her) carry on their subterranean work, stopping their underground trains only to pluck a mushroom which they find growing among the coal dust. They joke around in the showers afterwards, faces caked in dust. One of them, known as Langer, says that because of the 12 hour shifts, he sees his mate Löcke much more often than he does his own wife.
As well as Langer and Löcke, there is Kiri who drives the underground trains. Kiri is originally from Sri Lanka, but his family fled to Germany when he was a kid. Now he is regarded as being “more German than the Germans.” Thomas is a caretaker who looks after the showers while the others are underground. And then there is Martina, the only female German miner. Martina had a sex change some years ago, but continued with her job.
After a while of following the five at work, the pit closes down. Or rather it is closed down. There is still coal there to be mined, but it is no longer profitable, And, in the age of Fridays for Future, you feel that the mine owners would prefer to make their money elsewhere. The rest of the film looks at the human cost of this decision by following the five workers and what happens to them after they have been thrown out of work.
Some of them find jobs pretty quickly. Langer gets a job driving a school bus, while Martina finds work in a salt mine. Thomas hangs around the home which he shares with his mother, doing more than his fair share of cleaning and cooking. The latter pastime appeals to him and he enrols in a cookery course. Löcke enjoys his time lounging around at home, much to the disdain of his teenage daughter, who orders him to go out and look for a job.
Kiri is less lucky. We see him in endless telephone conversations with Deutsche Bahn, trying to get work as a train driver. But then he is called into the doctor who is concerned about the after-effects of a heart attack. He is ordered away from driving jobs, and ends up finding work teaching Tamil kids. He starts to reassess his relationship to Sri Lanka. Although he has only phoned home 3 times in 20 years, he wonders whether he should show his kids where they came from.
As well as work and home, we are let into people’s private lives. We follow Martina to voice therapy sessions where she is trying to find a voice with which she feels comfortable. A vocal coach leads her through exercises where she speaks/sings in a variety of tones – some higher, some lower, so that she has a voice which reflects her new sexual identity. Martina also talks to camera about working in an almost entirely male community and the difficulties she has finding a partner.
As all this happens, the camera watches on, recording everything but never intervening. This is sometimes effective, but not all the time. There are many occasions where we would like to know more about what motivates the characters. Martina occasionally reacts to off-screen questions, but we never hear what she is asked, and are certainly never allowed to ask our own. On other occasions, the lives which we watch are so mundane that they aren’t always too compelling.
As the film progresses, Löcke tries to persuade his old friend to join him in a road trip in a mobile home to France. Langer takes one look at the precarious sleeping arrangements and does not look at all impressed. But they go anyway, leaving their wives and families to carry on as normal. As they head Westwards through Belgium, they regularly get lost and argue with each other like a married couple which has spent perhaps a little too much time with each other.
And then, suddenly, there they are on a windswept French beach. They hug, and take photos of each other to send home. Which is fine for a while until there’s not much more for them to do. This is actually one of the drawbacks of the film, as much of what we see isn’t that interesting to watch. It is diverting enough to follow the different characters, but they’re not so exciting that we engage sufficient emotion in what actually happens to them. And it’s not as if they do much.
There are certainly moments of fun. Löcke seems to be generally perturbed by the growth of the environmental movement, which, you could argue, contributed towards his current lack of paid work. His daughter, always provocative, says that she used the Fridays on which demonstrations took place to play truant. Later, we see Löcke on the edge of the climate demo, not sure how to interact, or whether this is what he really wants to do.
It is these moments which make the film, but for too much time we are watching unexceptional people carry out their mundane lives. This is not meant as criticism of the people – I’m as unexceptional as the least interesting of them – but I wouldn’t necessarily pay good money to watch footage of my life either. As the camera sits back silently, we are sometimes drawn in by the personalities it shows. More often, though, you wonder if there’s much point in it all.
CinePhil 