A love story ? Tough love !

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23 September

In the Q&A session after the screening of Staub auf unseren Herzen / Dust on our Hearts (2012), Stephanie Stremler (Kathi) described not only how Susanne Lothar (Chris) improvised with her and, when it came to the fight, only the cameraman was in the know, but also the film as a love story between Kathi and Chris, two women who had been left to bring up children on their own, but who had different ways about them.

I had postulated that Stremler, if one of her own parents were a therapist and tried to relate to her on the basis of being a patient, she would think it inappropriate, and asked whether she thought that Chris was trying to achieve that status all along – this is where she, although acknowledging that Chris is trying to gain control, talked of it as a love story.

If so, then a love affair that goes wrong, and seems likely, unlike what Fabian (Florian Loycke) says about his relationships, to result in severance. The flaw in it all is to believe that a mother such as this would only in the course of the short span that we see here come to impose her will on the welfare of her daughter’s child, let alone get her on the sharp side of her therapist’s desk.

Films sometimes do this – present us with a situation and / or a problem and invite us not to think whether it would have happened before, or rather pass over in silence the question of what the director and editor are choosing to show us is actually likely to be new. However, Midnight in Paris (2011), though, does not ask that of us, because it presents a totally new experience for Gil, whereas the allegedly naturalistic world of a film such as this seeks to achieve its impact by simply immersing us in interlocking lives.

Here, the impossibility of Chris as a mother cannot simply have emerged with a loud conversation on her mobile when he daughter is in the changing-room – she has always been like this, and all that is new is that her estranged partner has come back to Berlin from Cologne after many a year. He is clearly expected by Kathi, so is it really likely that the practicality of where, when he drives there (and he drives there with all of his life in the car), he will spend the night, or of telling or not telling Chris that he is back in Berlin, will have been overlooked until now ? And yet the film has Wolfgang have a meal with Kathi and Lenni with none of this resolved.

This is where a slice of life comes up against the exigency of a film, in 90 to 120 minutes (typically around the 90 mark this season), to show us an unfolding – if one had ever had a mother such as Chris, one would not simply be on an even keel of meeting / being in contact with her on a daily basis, and so the starting premise of the film is falsified. To get back to my question of Stremler – a therapist parent who tries to have a son or daughter as a client is straying so far from accepted norms as obviously to have a psychological disorder, and then we are in the realm of the paradigm ‘Shrinks are madder than those whom they purport to treat’.

I do not doubt for a minute that the film arose from the music-making and the real-life puppet theatre of Stremler and Loycke, and this level is the only one on which we can properly view the drama of this film, as of puppets in a life-or-death struggle such as in the synopsis of Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka – if the characters are place-holders for emotions or emotional responses, then the piece can work, because we can acknowledge the artificiality of the theatre, of the depiction. We do not grieve for the policeman killed by Mr Punch because the interaction, the violence of the emotion, is stylized, divorced by being in the province of the booth.

In this film, where the origins lie, the only true human feeling is between Fabian and Kathi. Everything else is froth, and even the notion that Kathi is being moved out by him from the flat that her mother has purchased is belied by no notion that Kathi was ever living there (the last that we see of any joint endeavour to make it habitable is the painting scene), as we only ever see her in her old property, missing Lenni. Much is claimed, but only, in real terms, by insulting our intelligence.



Post-script
As I left Festival Central, I saw the film's poster again, mother and daughter as decorators so ungeschickt (if we believe that a woman who can buy a flat would not pay someone to see to the décor for her daughter) that both have a big daub of clown's red paint on their nose, and a long streak of white on the face of Chris accentuates that look.

In a way, this image both confirms and denies my thesis that the figures can only be seen tokenistically, as puppets, because it demonstrates an awareness that they have the potential just to be seen as archetypes, but nothing else suggests that we were ever asked to see their actions and natures from that viewpoint, and so maybe it does not go beyond thinking that it would make  good poster, easily forgotten.

Having written the review above, I am left feeling that I might be seen to have been too hard on the effort employed to make this film, because maybe it sins no more than many another, or because it was no great crime to have seemed to have promise. Except as to expression and choice of language, though, I do not feel that I need to offer excuses for a heartfelt opinion.


Post-post-script
Maybe we are meant to believe that it is the arrival of Wolfgang (Michael Kind), the father of Kathi, that precipitates everything : maybe Chris, despite signs to the contrary and when her hysteria that Wolfgang is around is based not on issues of domestic violence, but his having betrayed her with one of her friends, is supposed to be this way that we see with Kathi and Wolfgang purely on account of the trauma of his unexplained return from Cologne to Berlin...

I have already said why Wolfgang's arrival is problematic - unless we are meant to imagine that he loaded the car out of desperation and got out, not thinking of anywhere better to go than to his daughter. When he arrives, we have no idea who he is - an elder lover ? a friend ? - and there is nothing to suggest that him coming is anything other than expected, and that he has not been in regular contact with the person whom he is visiting (would Kathi really have concealed - been able to conceal - such contact from Chris ?).

No, I cannot think this through and make it work, which may be the flaw in improvising something that does not make sense beyond the boundaries of what is shown in screen.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)