Film – “Haltlos” in the cinema: Turning to potato topics

Adoption, pregnancy, women. For Kida Khodr Ramadan, these are very German topics, he writes in the press release for his new film “Haltlos,” which is about adoption, pregnancy and women. He leaves open what exactly concerns the rest of the world, but it doesn’t matter because Ramadan finally wanted to make a film that wasn’t about drugs, shooting, prison and other gangster topics. Nevertheless, “Haltlos” has somehow accidentally become another gangster film. Editing (Anja Neraal), equipment (Tbassom Charaf) and the atmosphere (Ramadan) are intoxicating, shabby and broken.

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Martha (Lilith Stangenberg; as always as Kate Moss on Propofol) has an affair with a married man (Samuel Schneider) and becomes pregnant by him. “I don’t want to be a mother, I’m far too selfish for that,” Martha says in one scene and decides to give the child up for adoption. The bureaucratic process is described like a used car sale (“Here’s the form for the clinic.”), the only question left is whether Martha has thought it through carefully. And that makes the main conflict of the 93-minute film clear.

Then, as if in a fever dream, Martha shuttles back and forth between her lover, her mother (Jeanette Hain), her father (Torsten Merten is allowed to open and close the apartment door three times in her underwear and without a word), various Berlin parks, cafés and her apartment and doesn’t know quite further.

Martha’s mother is a strict, stuffy normal citizen who recommends that her daughter find a “real man” and a “real job” (Martha works at a music label) so that she wouldn’t have the current problems. Her sister Isabel (Zsá Zsá Inci Bürkle) shows her a life based on the modular principle (including a cheating husband) and is no support to Martha as she staggers around. Representing society, the two formulate, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly, the requirements of today’s modern woman: sexy beast, but also domestic. Career focused but caring. Martha doesn’t want to adapt to this set of values ​​and she simply can’t.

In this struggle of desperately wanting to make it but not being able to, Lilith Stangenberg shows why she is so idolized by German indie cinema. Stangenberg basically busts his ass in front of the camera again to give Martha’s rebelliousness a form. She screams, cries, drools and whimpers to herself, so much so that one can only assume that the amount of suffering she is experiencing is almost biblical. And it’s true that what happens to Martha in “Haltlos” is an odyssey of doubt, unrequited love, searching, finding, losing.

Morality never appears in Ramadan’s films and this time too that is the pleasant side of the film. Martha wants to be a mother because everyone else wants her to be. But she doesn’t make it. Also because the people who previously promised to “always be there for you” don’t want to help her. So we watch her swing back and forth between feeling lost and a briefly popping sense of responsibility. Neither more nor less.

Ramadan writes in the same press release mentioned above that, in film terms, he has only ever played football and now wanted to try out volleyball. Such unpretentious, hammered sentences are probably the reason why Kida Ramadan is revered almost like a cult. “Haltlos” is another attempt to be recognized as a real artist, and you can see that in the film. There’s someone working here who wants to be able to do more than just make dark shooting movies with boom-thud-bass music (the music in “Haltlos” is by Brezel Göring, by the way, and the most exciting thing about the whole film). The attempt was quite okay, if Lilith Stangenberg – if you believe the press release, she took on half of the directing work – is to blame for the worse parts of the film.

Watching Martha’s misfortune is like taking a trip, so quickly does the action switch between a passionate night of love, cold hospital corridors, aimless visits to the park and her mother’s punitive gaze. Martha’s inner struggle takes place a lot outside: screaming, convulsing, crying. The viewer doesn’t have time to process it, because in the next scene Martha has to run from one apartment to another or eat a kebab in the park.

The strong scenes are the ones in which it becomes clear how much Martha actually takes place outside of the normal world. When her friend Fiona (Susanna Abdul Majid) asks her if it’s a boy or a girl, Martha thinks about why we need names at all, while Fiona just keeps babbling pragmatic stuff. Unfortunately, there are very few of these scenes. The primacy of aesthetics applies. And so Stangenberg spends most of his time writhing back and forth on the bed in a nonchalantly furnished apartment, sitting around in dive bars or parks with matted hair and a tracksuit, feeling desperate.

We don’t actually learn anything about adoption, pregnancy and women that at least women don’t already know. But volleyball is also a complicated sport.

“Haltlos”, Germany 2024. Director: Kida Khodr Ramadan, book: Antje Schall. With: Lilith Stangenberg, Samuel Schneider, Jeanette Hain. 96 minutes, cinema release: October 24th.

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