Life Is All You Get
Last year the Berlin company X-FILME creative pool was invited to screen Dani Levy's Silent Night in competition. Not bad - it was the company's feature film debut. Now X-FILME, founded in 1995, is back at the Berlinale with its second film - Wolfgang Becker's melancholy romantic comedy Life Is All You Get. Forty-three-year-old Becker is considered one of Germany's most talented film and television directors. Schmetterlinge (1986/87), his degree film for the German Academy of Film and Television (DFFB), won the student Oscar and was screened at festivals in Locarno and Saarbrücken. Kinderspiele (1991/92), a beautifully directed albeit depressing family portrait, won several awards including the German Film Critics Prize. The 'star' of Becker's new movie is post-Wall 1990s Berlin with all the trimmings: unemployment, a housing shortage, dysfunctional families, angst for the future and urban isolation.
Life Is All You Get (co-scripted with Tom Tykwer) is not a classically constructed story but rather a string of episodes that tie together the lives of a handful of Berliners. Take Jan (Jürgen Vogel), who works the night-shift in a slaughter house, and Vera (Christiane Paul), a musician - bewitched, bothered and bewildered. Or single mother Lilo (Martina Gedeck), who dreams of conventional family life, but has unwisely hooked-up with brutish Harri (Armin Rohde), a man her wiser-than-her-years daughter rejects completely. And Buddy (Ricky Tomlinson), who loses his job and seeks solace in rock 'n roll nostalgia: painful memories about times when the livin' was easy and income secure. The film was shot in Berlin's decidedly non-glam industrial wasteland, far from the elegance of the famous Kurfürstendamm. One image we see repeatedly is the Oberbaum Bridge. This bridge was sealed off while the Wall stood, but now connects two central Berlin districts.
Becker dismisses the allusion to unification: 'It's just a great motif.'
Life Is All You Get is a film about people making their way in a city on the mend, suspended between yesterday and today, crumbling at the edges. It's a study of love in the post-modern fin de siècle. And despite the air of Teutonic tristesse, our heroes still sing a lot, though often sadly and loudly: like children whistling in the dark. Silke Schütze
Regie (Dir): Wolfgang Becker.
Buch: Wolfgang Becker, Tom Tykwer.
Darsteller (Cast): Jürgen Vogel, Christiane Paul, Ricky Tomlinson, Armin Rohde, Martina Gedeck, Meret Becker.
Länge (Running time): 110 Minuten
[Home ] [Content ] [The Sponsors ] [The Team ] [Comments ] [Help ]
