Review of Matthias Glasner's film “Life” (Sterben)
Matthias Glasner's film "Life" (Sterben), which received the prize for best screenplay at this year's Berlin Film Festival, as well as four awards from the German Film Academy, is being released. Inspired by his own family and friends, the director paints a rather merciless portrait of a modern family, measuring out black humor, sentimentality, philosophical dilemmas and elements of social satire with vivisectoral precision. Tells Julia Shagelman.
Matthias Glasner began writing the script for his film, which, as the dedication to his family before the end credits confirms, is heavily autobiographical, after the birth of his first child and the death of his parents. Such things really make you think about your own mortality and about your role in the complex interweaving of family ties, when one person finds himself simultaneously child and adult, the object of care and the one who provides it, or, as in the case of the Lunis screen family, a victim of the lack of this very care and related warmth.
Lissie Lounis (Corinna Harfuch) wakes up on the floor of her apartment in a small town somewhere near Hamburg. She lives here with her husband Gerd (Hans-Uwe Bauer), who suffers from dementia, who no longer recognizes her and constantly leaves the house without pants. Lissie doesn’t have the strength to look after him: she has cancer, and then she also has a stroke. The adult children of the Lunises have dispersed to different cities, they always have more urgent things to do than answer their mother’s calls or visit their parents, and the only one who cares about them is a neighbor (Katrin Stoyan), whose motives are not entirely charitable: she is not averse to add a small amount to your pension for caring for Frau Lunis.
As befits a family saga of solid timing, “Life” is divided into chapters. The first is dedicated to Lissy, with Gerd as a supporting character increasingly disappearing into the darkness of oblivion. In the second, their son Tom (Lars Eidinger), a conductor, appears on stage, rehearsing with a youth orchestra a composition by his friend-composer Bernard (Robert Gwizdek) called “Dying” - this is how the film is called in the original, with evil irony or humility before the inevitable . Bernard's interest in death is not idle: he tried to commit suicide several times, and when he finally succeeds, it is just a matter of time.
And Tom’s life is, perhaps, even too stormy. He loves Liv (Anna Bederke), who gives birth to a child from another man, and Tom becomes something of an adoptive father to this child, despite the protests of the biological father. And he is loved by Ronia (Saskia Rosendahl), to whom he can only offer friendship and half-hearted sex in return. Tom has a convenient explanation for such coldness: after all, his mother never loved him, and this, among other things, is the real reason why he almost never communicates with his dying parents.
Not to say that his mother’s love somehow helped his younger sister Ellen (Lilith Stangenberg), a troubled and deeply unhappy dentist’s assistant who drowns her life in alcohol and casual relationships. She starts an affair with a doctor from the same clinic where she works (Ronald Zehrfeld), and he even briefly persuades her to stop drinking, but then returns to his wife, and Ellen falls into an even deeper abyss of addiction and self-hatred.
Left alone at Christmas, Tom watches Bergman's Fanny and Alexander for the hundredth time, a three-hour family epic that Glasner clearly takes cues from, although his story is less mystical and the domestic violence is entirely psychological and most often unintentional. Lovers meet and part, old people die, children are born, music, having gone through the crucible of rehearsals, nervous breakdowns, unsuccessful premieres and endless rewrites, takes shape into something whole (however, there will always be a critic who will reproach it for being banal and secondary). Tragic episodes alternate with those that would look quite appropriate in a sitcom, although a bit gloomy and not shying away from physiological functions. Everything, in short, is just like in life, no matter how banal and secondary it may sound.
