Lissy (Corinna Harfouch) is huddled on the ground in her nightgown, making an attempt to ring her son. Her legs and nightgown are smeared brown along with her common nightly incontinence, however it’s her husband who worries her: Gerd (Hans-Uwe Bauer) has wandered outdoors once more, unsure the place he’s and sporting no pants. Her neighbor is on the door, insisting on being useful, whereas Lissy simply desires her to chop brief this humiliation; has she noticed that even the telephone is now daubed with excrement?
Old age ain’t no place for sissies, as Bette Davis famously stated. The standard riposte is that it’s higher than the choice, however Matthias Glasner’s lengthy, absorbing and intermittently very humorous movie calls that into query. Life, even earlier than the debilities of age turn out to be its essential characteristic, is the actual issue.
Glasner’s story is a model of a standard household saga, however deconstructed to turn out to be a collection of overlapping chapters in regards to the household’s element people. The reality is that Lissy, Gerd, son Tom and his sister Ellen clearly don’t cohere as a household and, as a grimly humorous truth-telling session between Lissy and Tom will reveal, by no means actually did. Lissy cares for Gerd equably sufficient, however when she has a coronary heart assault and he’s put right into a care house, what exhibits on her face is her unstated reduction at having the ability to think about her personal illnesses.
At that time, a new chapter is launched that can heart on Tom (Lars Eidinger), a junior orchestral conductor in a unique metropolis: he works in Berlin, whereas they’re in Hamburg. Tom is formally unattached, however has undertaken to be a stand-in father to his former associate’s new child. He helps to ship little Jessie on the exact second his mom calls him.. “A pity it isn’t yours,” Lissy says sourly.
Tom is busy, as he says, conducting a brand new work — known as “Dying” — by his tortured composer buddy Bernhard (Robert Gwisdek). Bernhard has been speaking for 20 years about killing himself; Tom is the buddy who will get his despairing late-night calls and bears the brunt of his frequent bouts of rage. He is much less indulgent in the direction of his sister Ellen (Lilith Stangenberg) when she calls; she is a drunk in love along with her personal dissipation, a bar-room queen who sings earlier than throwing up on the ground and frequently wakes up in rooms she doesn’t acknowledge. “Ring me,” says Tom at one level, “when you haven’t been drinking.”
One of the nice pleasures of this movie is the contradictions in its characters: Tom is a born helper, beneficiant and type, however ladies accuse him of being cold-hearted and, regardless of appearances, he is aware of they’re proper. Music is his love. A sequence by which he conducts a rehearsal of Bernhard’s piece “Dying”, exhibiting the rapt faces of the musicians in his youth orchestra earlier than returning to Eidinger’s expression of transported pleasure because the sound pours in the direction of his podium, is profoundly shifting in a means that resists evaluation: right here is the facility and fantastic thing about artwork, a strong glory within the midst of this muddle of grievances, longings and unsettled lives.
Glasner has a high quality ear for absurdity and the awful humor to be present in failure; when Lissy admits to Tom that she was not merely a foul mom, however an abusive one, her lack of embarrassment is hilarious in itself. The proven fact that drunken Ellen is a dental nurse is one other joke, underlined when she has to extract her consuming buddy’s tooth in a bar’s bathroom, hooking one foot towards the washbasin to achieve traction as she pulls on a set of repurposed carpenter’s pliers.
It doesn’t all the time work this effectively, admittedly: Ellen’s degeneracy can really feel overstated, even ridiculous. That she would maintain on to her job even after collapsing over a affected person with a drill in his mouth defies perception. So does the concept that Bernhard may slap round younger musicians on the Berlin Philharmonic with out HR elevating hell, defies perception; Dying by no means pretends to be social realism, with its heightened shade and interleaved chapter headings, however at these moments it feels as whether it is subsiding into melodrama.
It is pulled again from the brink, nonetheless, by the quiet power of Eidinger’s central efficiency and the eye paid by the director and the opposite actors to the main points of previous age and habit; each character rings true, even when their conditions sometimes don’t. And these moments of extra have their very own narrative logic. To stuff a lot loss of life and dying into one story, nonetheless voluminous, is a formidable problem, however Glasner manages his huge stage by permitting waves of feeling to roll ahead after which retreat; its depth is measured, interspersed with these respites of humor.
And so we beat towards the tide, reaching a satisfying level the place Tom, at the least, appears to have reached some type of happiness — at the least till loss of life comes to assert him, because it does all of us. That isn’t even a dismal thought. In a sure mild, it may be seen as a little bit of amusing.
Title: Dying
Festival: Berlin (Competition)
Sales agent: Match Factory
Director/screenwriter: Matthias Glasner
Cast: Lars Eidinger, Corinna Harfouch, Lilith Stangerberg, Hans-Uwe Bauer, Ronald Zehrfeld
Running time: 3 hr
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