Josef Hader’s film “Andrea is getting a divorce”: “Andrea is getting a divorce” in the cinema: penitents and fine notices

Life in the country seems peaceful, but that is deceptive. Especially here in Austria. In the very first scene of Josef Hader’s “Andrea Gets a Divorce” we see the police officer Andrea doing a speed check on a country road. But nobody comes. The street remains empty. Fields to the right and left where the grain sways in the wind.

Time passes even for lonely police officers, albeit slowly, but at least everyone knows everyone here. Birgit Minichmayr as Andrea is dominated by a mixture of apathy and a tiny hope that something could happen at some point. Because the boredom here, not far from St. Pölten, the next “bigger” city, is almost unbearable. Then finally a speeder! When she stops him, he shouts angrily: “Man, Andrea, I’m in a hurry!” – “Pay first!” she replies in an official police tone that seems strangely out of place here.

This is the scenario: People have known each other, usually since childhood, and yet remain strangers to each other. Something lurking and eventful is in the air. Andrea wants to leave here. Away from the police station in the village, away from her husband, the alcoholic from whom she has long been separated but who keeps ambushing her. She applied to the criminal police in St. Pölten, a big leap for her, also away from her semi-demented father, who is in need of care, with whom she now lives.

Province sucks. It takes a special talent to find stories here that are worth telling. Josef Hader has been cultivating exactly this kind of provincial story with his cabaret programs for 30 years. His first program, “Privat,” with which he toured for many years, still sets the tone today: radically subjective with a sense of the bizarre. With occasional surreal outbursts.

Man, Hader knows, is an infinitely sad animal. There is little that can be done about it. Maybe on the outside, but on the inside? Hader was first seen as an actor in Paul Harather’s “India” (1993) as a restaurant inspector, a prisoner in eternal field service who no one brings back. Death will be the only one who remembers him.

This is Hader’s second feature film as a director and actor. In “Wilde Maus” from 2017, he was seen as a music critic who is almost turned amok by the mindless neoliberal destruction of everything that has value beyond saleability. His newspaper fired him after half a generation, or more precisely: the click-counting philistine of a boss who doesn’t even know that Mozart’s “Abduction from the Seraglio” is not an opera, but a musical play. And then we hear an exchange between them that seems classic for this time: “There will be a revolt by the readers!” – “Your readers are long dead!”

Okay, but you still have to keep going, even if the rest of what you’re grateful for disappears like snow in the spring sun. And Hader is a rock in the surf of the zeitgeist in the calm, unspectacular way in which he creates a tragedy of the most inevitable kind with “Andrea Gets a Divorce.” Everyone here speaks the Austrian dialect, and anyone who makes the effort will gradually understand it. Action? Only the most necessary and that is already fatal enough.

There is a lot of drinking in the country, but less talking. And so we see Andrea, who thinks she is almost in St. Pölten, in the village pub after work. She drinks seltzer, the others drink beer and schnapps. Especially her estranged husband, who has become talkative as his alcohol level rises and urges her to return to him. Not to a drunkard like you, he gets the answer and then has to get another drink. Then he wants to get into the car, but Andrea takes the key away from him. Now he has to walk home.

Now the village’s history becomes fateful. Because shortly afterwards Andrea also gets into her car. She drives along the dark country road, the same one that was so empty during the day for traffic control. Her half-crazy father calls on her cell phone and insults her for leaving him alone for so long. She calms him down as best she can – and suddenly there is a dull bang. She ran over someone. It’s not hard to guess who. She tries to resuscitate her, but in vain. Andrea accidentally ran over her husband, whom she sent home on foot in the dark night. But now she commits a hit-and-run in a panic. There are no witnesses in this lonely area anyway. But the next morning her police colleagues come to her and tell her about her husband’s accidental death. The driver of the accident has already turned himself in. Andrea is nothing to look at, but what now begins is the story of guilt and punishment in the village.

Because none other than Franz (how rugged: Josef Hader), the local religious teacher, a dry alcoholic, takes all the blame. He killed her husband, even though he always drives very slowly and doesn’t drink anymore. Franz suffers badly – in fact, it turns out that he was the second person to run over the already dead man. But that can’t stop Franzen’s penance. He starts drinking excessively again, is expelled from school and can’t contain himself because of his remorse. He has forfeited his life! And Andrea, the tough girl who no one suspects, finds herself in a strange inner state of emergency.

Suddenly she feels so fundamental. If she gets away with a crime, as it looks like, has she really gotten away with it? How is she supposed to start a new life in St. Pölten, with the burden of what has happened? Something in her believes less and less that you’re only guilty if you get caught. As a police officer, that has been one of her life maxims so far.

It is the great interaction between Birgit Minichmayr and Josef Hader that turns this sparsely staged story into a cinematic event that stays with you for a long time. What a quiet catharsis – and of all things the wreck of a person that Hader shows so congenially here is what triggers this in Andrea.

“Andrea gets divorced”, Austria 2024. Director: Josef Hader; Book: Josef Hader, Florian Kloibhofer. With: Birgit Minichmayr, Josef Hader, Thomas Schubert, Robert Stadlober, Thomas Stipsits. 93 min. Film release: April 4th.