When apparently ’solid’ couples surprise their friends by breaking up out of the blue, someone else will usually pipe up that no-one else can ever really know what goes on behind the locked doors in any relationship.
This German drama, a multiple prize-winner at last year’s Berlinale, is impressive for the way it dissects everything that goes on behind those doors in telling and often subtle ways during a lazy summer holiday in Sardinia.
The relationship is that between Gitti (Birgit Minichmayr), a fun-loving, 30-something record company publicist, and Chris (Lars Eidinger), a stitched up architect frustrated that his career has yet to kick into gear. It’s a case of opposites attract, underlined by an obviously strong sexual bond, but their disagreements are not always predictable: it’s the spontaneous Gitti who wants to settle down, for instance, while Chris is unable to commit, either to Gitti or anything else in his life.
With her splendid debut film Forest for the Trees, writer-director Maren Ade created a character study of a shy schoolteacher sinking into emotional crisis, using a standard dramatic arc. With her second feature she throws aside the screenwriting guidebook to create a penetrating exercise in social-psychology. There’s no denying that its rambling nature – there’s a narrative but no plot, as such – will likely frustrate some viewers. In Ade’s words, this is a film that draws 'its suspense from the unique, complicated configuration that can only be generated by two people interacting".
When a filmmaker forgoes some of the usual structural support mechanisms in their storytelling, their observation and characterisation needs to be unusually sharp to make up for it. Here, luckily, Ade delivers, displaying a perspicacity that makes the film feel so real that almost everyone who’s got as far as their 30s will feel as if she has uncannily peered into their memories and uncovered the secrets of past relationships.
She’s aided by an extraordinary performance from Minichmayr, which deservedly netted the Berlinale’s top female acting prize, while Eidinger (the actor who delivered an amazing Hamlet on stage at this year’s Sydney Festival) is flawless in the less flamboyant role.
