In the whisper of the times: laughter is later in the GDR.
Photo: new visions
It does not happen that often that a German film opens the main competition in Cannes. Rarely enough, German films are invited there, and even less often they make the critics’ eyes shine. The last time the Maren ADE achieved “Toni Erdmann” in 2016. With his subtle humor, it was a very indifferent film about a difficult father-daughter relationship. “Look in the sun” by Mascha Schilinski does not convince with shimmering lightness or exuberant humor; On the contrary: your film reaches deeply into the cutlery box of German romance, with all its depths. And this down -to -earthness is a prerequisite for one of the most exciting films of recent times. Schilinski won the jury’s price in Cannes.
There is less a gripping plot – there is no such thing. “Looking into the sun” does not follow a classic narrative structure, but is rather something that the creators call an “associative stream of souvenir” by the time. The setting is a centuries -old four -sided courtyard in the Altmark; The film will not leave this room in the two and a half hours of term. The focus is on four girls who have lived in different political and social systems and contexts in the courtyard over the course of 100 years or still live and whose fates seem to be interwoven in a miracle way.
At the beginning, the spectator is left to the action without a stop when the adolescent Erika (Lea Drinda) secretly observed the sleeping war -intended uncle with his leg stump in the middle of the Second World War and tried out its crutches. While the girl loses her erotic fantasies, the work remains, which finally brings her father’s blows. In the following scene we meet Alma (Hanna Hecken), who, as a child of a family of landowners, lives on the farm shortly before the First World War.
In the 80s GDR years, it was the pubescent Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky), whose awakening sexuality leads to faults within the family. Finally, in the present, the farm is renovated by a large -scale Berlin family of artists after a long vacancy. Their daughter Nelly (Zoë Baier) grows in an apparent gene-Z consort; The mythical layers of the past that are on the farm cannot escape either.
Everyone has certainly wondered what may have happened in their own four walls, which people there have lived there and what fates may have played here. This is roughly the basic idea that Schilinski and her co-author Louise Peter Team when they discovered this four-sided courtyard in a small old market village and then wrote the script there in the quiet Corona years. “Script book” is, of course, euphemism, because there is no such thing as there is no linear action. The farm is the real protagonist of the film; It is the basis and prerequisite for life that its residents from four generations lead there.
The subjective look of the actresses shapes the film as well as the episodic structure, which jumps back and forth by the different times and shows an excerpt from the life of the girls every time. Only gradually does a narrative peel, become lines of development and relationships, the individual episodes begin to relate, tell history (s) and thus interweave the events on the farm into an epic narrative.
In philosophy, there was long opinion that people are a completely blank leaf at birth and that the matrix of our lives is only shaped by experiencing, education, education and early childhood stamps. Schilinski contradicts this; It tells how the existential experiences, the experiences and trauma of our ancestors in the bodies and souls of the post -born leave traces and hardening, which they unconsciously accompany them through life and form an invisible network, the catch of which can hardly be escaped.
You can find that quite esoterically, but even the hardest materialist will sometimes hear this murmur of the time (s), perhaps in a dream, the non -tangible, floating, ambivalent of our existence. In addition, science also knows today that a personality is actually not only shaped by its current living conditions, but experienced trauma can be inherited over several generations, burning in the genes, so to speak.
The “blank leaf” is considered outdated. This reading is a mandatory prerequisite for the film, in which the shadows of the past lie like a film on the following generations, determine the perception and create a pattern of repetitions.
Last but not least, “look into the sun” is a film about women and their role in the social structure, which has experienced a dramatic reinterpretation over the course of the last century. Maids who must be nothing more than living inventory, family structures full of violence against women and the brutal or at least careless upbringing of the children – that is reminiscent of Michael Hanekes “The White Band”, a parable of the origins of fascism. In the later GDR years, there is nothing more to be felt of joylessness and equality more than just a phrase. As the women confidently “their husband”, testifies to social upheavals, which of course do not change the fragility of family relationships.
For Mascha Schilinski, born in 1984, “looking into the sun” is her second feature film for “Die Daughter” (2017). Her earlier experience as an employee of a casting agency for children and adolescents was undoubtedly worth gold in the consistently convincing occupation of the leading roles. In general, it is amazed at the maturity of life and which Schilinski approaches her subject. In addition to its open form, what makes your generation portrait is the sophisticated cinematic implementation that makes it with associative assembly that dream and reality merged seamlessly.
The time levels between the past and the present dissolve, cross and whisper, while the camera floats through the rooms and designs large tableaus. Different optics and even the use of a perforated camera visualize this veil of memory, while a sophisticated sound design reinforces the image level and integrates the viewer deep into the plot. This formal joy of experimentation initially demands a lot from the audience, but soon familiarity with the characters and their inner life will appear.
Leaving it again seems to have been difficult for the director, so that the film is difficult to find out from his round of love, desire, fate, death, childhood and memory in the end. Half an hour less would have been more. However, that should not be deterred anyone. According to current reports, “look into the sun” will go to the next Oscar race as a German candidate.
“Look into the sun”, Deutschand 2025. Director: Mascha Schilinski; Screenplay: Mascha Schilinski/Louise Peter. With: Lea Drinda, Hanna Hecken, Lena Urzendowsky, Zoë Baier. 149 min.
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