Philipp and Philip

More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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20 September

I can only guess that the end of Philipp was meant to shock, but, as we had been in that location before, and I had thought then of what happens, it didn’t. I also didn’t feel that it necessarily fitted (although it could have done), and that what was a very well-played portrayal by Max Hegewald of acute embarrassment and pain at the pretences and stupidities of life (largely because of being at home with his parents) could have had some other resolution.

The scenes between Christa (Vanessa Krüger) and Philipp, when allowed to be themselves (and not involved in silly family rubbish at the ice-cream parlour, almost inevitably the place to go to with a new person in polite German society), are very telling, and went well, as a pairing, with snatches of intimacy in what followed, Above us Only Sky (Über uns das All).

I found the heart of Philipp there, and, by contrast, recalled only all too well how a significant birthday in my own life had to be spent with not only my family, but my parents’ friends, and their jokes, attitudes, etc. – I felt unsure whose birthday it was (whose needs are met by this coming-of-age stuff?), and, at a later stage in life (when leaving a job), really didn’t want it marked by a present that I didn’t want just because that was the protocol of moving on.

For some of us, such feelings of awkwardness stay part of life, and many other films in this festival feed into each other’s themes in this regard: Black Butterflies, Tomboy, and Tirza seem to do this, too. Philip Larkin, not with any great insight, enlivened a pretty unremarkable poem with his well-known opening line ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’.


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