DRAMA; 2hr 29min (German with subtitles)
STARRING: Hanna Heckt, Lena Urzendowsky, Laeni Geiseler, Lea Drinda
Golden child: Heckt (centre)
With zero fanfare or explanation, director Mascha Schilinski slips like an unseen guest into an East German farmhouse whose resident family is a mare’s nest of agendas. Prowling through its gloomy rooms, the camera bears witness with dreamlike randomness to four generations of tightly connected girls.
Their enmeshed histories, co-scripted by Schilinski and Louise Peter, open in the 1940s, where teenage Erika (Drinda) gazes in morbid fascination at her sleeping amputee uncle (Martin Rother as Fritz). Erika has bound up one of her own legs, to better imagine how Fritz might be feeling. Make of this what you will.
Moving right along, Schilinski’s scattershot unpacking dips back into the 1910s, whose seven-year-old Alma (Heckt) is a blonde spark of life among her dour, death-obsessed rellies, then leapfrogs to the 2020s, in which 12-year-old wishful thinker Lenka (Geiseler) is besotted with a blasé older girl (Ninel Geiger). From there, it is back to the 1980s and rebellious adolescent Angelika (Urzendowsky), intent on pushing the limits of her restrictive existence.
With a screenplay so purposely more show than tell, cinematographer Fabian Gamper’s lingering images, played out against the constancy of their landscapes, are essential signposts in a mash-up of time. Everything old is new, then old, then new all over again as Schilinski’s century of summers casts its opaque light over imprisoning female truths.
