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Leaving the Frame (2019)
travel documentary with beautiful look
If you love travel documentaries, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish one from the other. Dreamlike landscape joins dreamlike landscape, in between protagonists on search for meaning. The subgenre has long switched to autopilot. Maria Ehrich and Manuel Vering's self-discovery trip reminds strongly in terms of content as well as formally on "Reiß aus Zwei Menschen". Two years. A dream, which came to the German cinemas in March 2019. A kind of documentary cloning that still makes a few things different.
Here's how a couple packs the suitcases and comments on their business venture. Here and there, there is a dispute at some point, because the long squat is a stress test for the relationship. And here and there, the protagonists not only talk about themselves, but pick out a handful of interesting personalities on the way to introduce them to the cinema audience. Instead of retelling their journey in chronological order, however, they sort the events collected on the way thematically and do not turn every encounter with strangers into a positive experience. Apart from that, but also travels this documentary well-known streets.
Maria Ehrich is an actress and in crisis. The job offers are missing, she has doubts about her talent. So the leading actress known from the gemstone trilogy (ruby red, sapphire blue, emerald green) travels with her boyfriend. His name is Manuel Vering, is a journalist and constantly armed with a camera. He knows how to photograph his photogenic girlfriend as well as nature spectacularly.
Like almost all documentary films about traveling, Leaving the Frame looks fantastic too. The colors are strong and bright, the aerial drone shots are particularly spectacular and would suit any large-scale production. Whether Vering is occupationally concerned with it or has reached such mastery as a hobby filmmaker remains an open question. On the homepage to the film he calls himself only as a "camera nerd". In general, the audience learns little about him. Although the film is primarily about Ehrich, who takes over much of the narration. Consequently, she would have had to travel alone.
Refreshing is, however, that Ehrich and Vering do not tell their travel experiences linear throughout, but along a thematic red thread. From her itinerary, which leads her from Kenya via Belize and Mexico, across the United States and to Newfoundland, they turn off again and again, returning to an earlier point. Then they stand in a national park in the US, wondering about the few birds and look back from there to Kenya, where they talk with a conservationist about the bird dying.
Interviews with previously researched interlocutors like this, however, convince only rudimentary. The idea behind not bringing the next completely self-centered circumnavigation of the globe to being "more than just tourists," as Ehrich put it, is stronger than the result. The conversations - among others with a nun caring for orphans and a painter and Holocaust survivor - are of very different quality. Especially the latter remains superficial. Here you notice the young Ehrich simply her inexperience as a journalist. In the end, the conversations seem like a fig leaf, which is intended to cover up the fact that only two tourists were on the move again, who want to refinance their search for meaning. Of course, the book on the film is already at the bookseller. Talk show appearances for promotional purposes are compulsory.
If you have seen more than one of these travel tips or read travel reports in this format, you do not need to look at Leaving the Frame. The gain in knowledge remains manageable: traveling expands the horizon, because travelers have to leave their familiar environment, their frame (as the title implies), and look at themselves from a different perspective. If you can not get enough of postcard views of the world, do not go wrong here.
Golden Twenties (2019)
Phenomenal and profoundly disturbing
Sophie Kluge wants to get close to the reality of today's 20-year-olds and places a reserved heroine at the center of her film, which is still in search of herself and her position in life.
A nice neighbor carries Ava (Henriette Confurius) the heavy suitcase up the stairs, as the young woman from a stay abroad returns to her mother's apartment. At first, one does not recognize the prominent guest actor in Sophie Kluge's feature film »Golden Twenties«, but it is actually Blixa Cash, who tackles here so energetically. Ava is 25, and the title of the film means, ironically, her life and maybe even a generation. Young people like Ava, who are at a crossroads: The study is finished, but how it should go on, is uncertain. Even Ava must first find her place in life. When asked what she's up to, she answers, "I'm not sure yet."
The Phenomenal and profoundly disturbing thing about Kluge's episodic feature film is that you do not know its main character at the end. The production consistently revolves around the provisional vagueness of the young woman. Ava seems to fit in everywhere, just because she lacks a sharp interest profile.
It should initially be a guest performance at the theater. The place receives the Ava by relations of the mother, which is drawn as vague as the daughter, moreover. Everything looks undefined: the relationship of the young woman to men, to work, even to the mother. With certainty it can only be said that Ava is there, that it exists. And when she actually has sex with one of the young actors from the theater, it seems she just wants to do something, because that's just what it's all about.
Sophie Kluge staged this film because she did not feel represented in the cinema. The trend to tell of strong young women, she is basically great, but restrained heroines were always neglected. That's why she wanted to focus on a silent fighter. Kluge has a fine sense for subcutaneous processes, latent depressives - and the phrases that gloss over the fact that everything is actually quite terrible: the uncertainty, the invisible perspective, the generally prevailing non-bindingness.
All relationships in "Golden Twenties" are clearly strained. What is said in this film about the theatrical work that it succeeds as on a staggering ship, also applies to Avas existence. She lets herself be carried away.
The most interesting are probably the interactions between the theater director (Nicolas Wackerbarth), actors, assistant director and the guest assistant Ava during the rehearsals and piece discussions and the way how Ava is kept down here with friendly insincerity; how conflicts are ironed away before they can be formulated; how territories are marked and defended mercilessly. If the mother hangs the chain on the door in the evening and prevents Ava from getting in, it gains symbolic content. One desperately wants Ava to reach for the ax and hit all the doors.