Emily Atef’s drama, following a dreamy teenager into an affair with a middle-aged man, addresses difficult material with a driving narrative force
More Than Ever director Emily Atef’s new film is a tale of erotic obsession and despair in the farmlands of Thuringia on the eastern side of Germany’s now vanished internal border: it is the summer of 1990, the last historic moments of the GDR. This is a movie to raise the possibility that Germany has still not perhaps made a full reckoning with the euphoric trauma of the Berlin Wall coming down. Atef finds something mythic, tragic and romantic in the great healing rupture. Something comic, too. There is a bizarre, and unexpectedly funny scene when a Trabant – that well-known symbol of communist Germany’s cultural cringe to the west – veers chaotically off the road, turning over like a biscuit box on wheels; the driver stoically shoves it back on to the road and drives off in it.
Films set in this period do tend to be about the fascinatingly alien, bygone world of East Berlin and East Germany rather than the boring old prosperous west. So it proves here. (Psychogeographers at the Berlin film festival might also ponder that the Berlinale Palast, the festival’s gleaming modern centre, is sited in what used to be West Berlin.) The setting is a farm, run by hardworking Siegfried (Florian Panzner) and his wife Marianne (Silke Bodenbender), which has just about survived the hard times of the postwar years and the economic crisis of monetary integration with the western Deutsche Mark. Their teenage son Johannes (Cedric Eich) is thrilled by the possibilities of the west, where he wants to study photography.
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