This film director isn’t happy. The audience to one of his films shown at the Berlin Film Festival jeered his work as it was being screened. I wonder if their reaction had something to do with the subject matter of the film ?
Set in Berlin and based on a play by Norway’s Jon Fosse, “Nightsongs” is about an unsuccessful, depressed novelist and his frustrated wife who is about to run away with her lover when the writer kills himself by jumping out of the window.
Er, Great……I’ll call the Odeon now.
His isn’t the only German film to concentrate on depressing subjects though.
In recent years there have been dark, brooding German films in the Berlinale about topics such as extremist Red Army Faction leader Andreas Baader, a mistress dumped on holiday ending up with delinquent teenagers, and a sympathetic portrayal of a woman who plants a bomb in a high-rise building.
Before anyone has a go at me for being flippant, anti-German or a tool of Hollywood I’d better say that one of the best films I saw last year was this one. Teutonic, political subject matter and amateurish compared to many US blockbusters – but absolutely brilliant nonetheless. Anyone who hasn’t seen it yet is missing out.
