Beginners
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Beginners |
| Original title | Beginners |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 2010 |
| length | 105 minutes |
| Age rating |
FSK 0 JMK 6 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Mike Mills |
| script | Mike Mills |
| production |
Miranda de Pencier Jay Van Hoy Lars Knudsen |
| music | Roger Neill Dave Palmer Brian Reitzell |
| camera | Kasper Tuxen |
| cut | Olivier Bugge Coutté |
| occupation | |
| |
Beginners is a 2010 US drama film directed by Mike Mills and starring Ewan McGregor , Christopher Plummer and Mélanie Laurent .
action
38 year old Oliver works as a graphic designer and lives alone. After his father's death, he takes care of his dog Arthur, who wants to be there everywhere. At a costume party , Oliver ( disguised as Sigmund Freud ) meets Anna, an unconventional French actress, with whom he begins a loose relationship. The first night the two only communicate through sign language and pantomime .
Flashbacks to the final years of Oliver's father, Hal, are shown throughout the film. Hal was married to Oliver's mother for 44 years. After their death, he begins to live openly gay and enjoys his life with gay friends and his much younger lover Andy. During this time a close relationship develops between Oliver and his father, who shows him how to enjoy his life. Then Hal learns of his fatal cancer, which he hides from Andy and from which he dies shortly afterwards.
Oliver begins to analyze his previous life. During his childhood, his mother Georgia compensated for her listless life with a gay husband with a humorous and unconventional relationship with her son. Later, Oliver has several love affairs with women, but he hardly gets involved emotionally, so that these relationships are ended after a few years or even months.
He is also very concerned about his father Hal's life. Oliver processes this experience in his work as a graphic designer for a music label , which he is not very successful with.
Anna suffers from her engaging father, who pushes her to make long phone calls. Although she and Oliver have a lot of fun together, the relationship seems to end, like some of Oliver's relationships before that.
Ultimately, however, they find each other again.
Reviews
The lexicon of international films judged that "the film as a whole leaves a strong emotional impression" .
Awards
In 2011, actor Christopher Plummer was named Best Supporting Actor of the Year at the Hollywood Film Festival and by the National Board of Review . The film won in the same year with The Tree of Life by Terrence Malick the Gotham Awards . In 2012, Plummer received the Oscar and Golden Globe Awards for best supporting actor.
synchronization
The film was set to music at Berliner Synchron . Tobias Neumann wrote the dialogue book, Christoph Cierpka directed the dialogue.
| role | actor | Voice actor |
|---|---|---|
| Oliver | Ewan McGregor | Philipp Moog |
| Hal | Christopher Plummer | Lothar Blumhagen |
| Anna | Mélanie Laurent | Emily Behr |
| Andy | Goran Višnjić | Klaus-Peter Grap |
| Georgia | Mary Page Keller | Traudel Haas |
| Shauna | China Shavers | Sanam Afrashteh |
background
The film has strong autobiographical traits. Mike Mills' father admitted his homosexuality at the age of 75 and died just a few years later. Mills began work on the script six months after his father's death. In a time of mourning, he packed a lot of personal information into the story. Mills wanted to make a simple but dense film. In the audio commentary, he cites films by Federico Fellini , Jean-Luc Godard and István Szabó as role models for his work.
Director and screenwriter Mills describes the shooting as good and challenging. He really appreciated that he got Ewan McGregor and Christopher Plummer together for this film. The dog Cosmo, whose name was Arthur in the film , played an important role for Mills, himself a dog owner - and not just for him: Mills reports that after the shooting, Ewan McGregor also got a dog.
The director tried hard to ensure the authenticity of the locations. The film is set in Los Angeles, most of the locations are actually in this form, and the routes from one location to another are largely correct. Places that appear in the film include the Biltmore Hotel , which hosted several Academy Awards in the 1930s / 1940s , the Lovell Health House by architect Richard Neutra and the antiquarian Cosmopolitan Bookstore on Melrose Avenue and La Brea, whose Owner also plays the owner in the movie. Other locations were Elysian Park and, above all, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Mills strongly associates Los Angeles with these locations.
There was a lot of work with available light in the film. that is, the light was reduced to natural sources with little assistance from artificial light. Some of the rooms were not illuminated in a targeted manner, but instead they were filmed there at a suitable time of day, when the sun best fell through the windows. This applies in particular to the Lovell Health House , where, according to the director, the lighting conditions in the rooms were observed during the day before shooting, before a shooting schedule was created depending on the light and time of day.
Art in many facets plays a major role in film, museums, illustrated books, the work of the protagonist as a graphic artist. An autobiographical parallel here is that Mills' father was actually a museum director, like the character of Oliver's father in the film. Another theme that runs through the film is the struggle for homosexual recognition in society, with references to the lesbian and gay movement , Harvey Milk , the movement's rainbow flag and the Los Angeles gay scene.
The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival 2010. It was released in theaters in April 2011, in Germany the film could be seen from June 9, 2011.
Web links
- Beginners in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Official page for the film
- Beginners at rotten tomatoes (English)
- Reviews for beginners at Moviepilot
Individual evidence
- ↑ Approval (PDF; 33 kB) of the voluntary self-regulation of the film industry
- ↑ Age rating for beginners . Youth Media Commission .
- ↑ Beginners. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
- ↑ German synchronous index: German synchronous index | Movies | Beginners. Retrieved April 3, 2018 .
- ↑ a b c d Mike Mills' audio commentary of the DVD release
- ↑ See also the article on Lovell House in the English Wikipedia
- ↑ Information from the director about the locations from the homepage of Focus Features ( memento of the original from March 2, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Toronto International Film Festival . Archived from the original on December 13, 2011. Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved October 23, 2011.
- ↑ Start dates in the IMDB
