Are you happy?

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Movie
Original title Are you happy?
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 2018
length 88 minutes
Rod
Director Max count
script David Ungureit
production Jörg Himstedt ,
Liane Jessen
music Daniel Hoffknecht
camera Carol Burandt from Kameke
cut Stefan Blue
occupation

Are you happy? is a German television film by Max Zähle from 2018. Laura Tonke and Ronald Zehrfeld play a separated couple in the tragicomic relationship drama who spends another day and night together to sell their weekend house.

Are you happy? opened the Biberach Film Festival 2018 and was awarded as the best TV film. The TV premiere on German television was on January 2, 2019. In November 2019, the film competed for the 3sat audience award .

content

Sonja and Marc, both around 40, are married to each other in their second marriage. They recently separated, triggered by Marc's affair with their 15-year-old work colleague Susanne. For one day Sonja and Marc are on the road together again to sell the weekend house just outside Frankfurt , which they once selected and bought together. In flashbacks, some of which contrast directly with contemporary scenes, you experience them in intimate, passionate moments of their 13-year relationship as well as in a dispute - a dispute about apparently trivial things, such as a salt shaker, but also about elementary things such as love, loyalty and children together. Both are so far childless; Sonja dares to put in the room, this could be a "sign", while Marc does not dare to tell her what he says Susanne bluntly, as this opens him she was pregnant: He has several years ago sterilize leave , irreversible.

At their destination, the two of them are expected by their neighbors there - the previous owners of their house who take care of the property in their absence - a dignified couple who are affectionate and friendly to them. Convinced that Sonja and Marc should stay together, they made sure with a double lie that the prospective buyers announced for the evening did not come until the following morning. So those willing to break up spend another night together. You see through the “game”, but you don't avoid it. Injuries come up, as well as things that unite, up to and including mutual confession, which everyone valued most in the other. When the bell rings in the morning, they are sitting on the couch, a warming blanket on their knees, and hesitate to open it. There are two questions asked shortly before: "Are you happy?" - "You?"

reception

Director Max Zähle succeeds in gaining something “very charming” from the “actually very depressing constellation”. Are you happy? is at times even a “couple comedy ”, says Claudia Tieschky ( SZ ), and in any case a “ kitsch- free love film, bittersweet”. With that she agrees with Oliver Junge ( FAZ ). Both also agree in their appreciation for the main actors: on the one hand Ronald Zehrfeld , who “seldom looked so muscular, but also rarely looked so vulnerable” in the role of Marc, the “bear-like protector, who is no longer allowed to be a protector and therefore often uselessly like a bear in the area ”; on the other hand, the “terrific sad-defiant” Laura Tonke , who plays a “very injured” Sonja, “in whom the woundedness leads to an absolutely gorgeous unpredictability”. Both Zehrfeld and Tonke are "at the zenith of their skills" in the film.

Thomas Gehringer ( tittelbach.tv ) also expressly praises the acting achievements, as well as the "coherent, truly sounding dialogues" and the "lively staging". The only point of criticism that he brings up concerns the male main character - she is “a little simpler”. Marc as “a man in the midlife crisis who gets a younger girlfriend, whom his wife only saw crying when her dog Charly died in an accident, who too seldom says 'I love you' and when asked what love is for him , a comparison from the car world comes to mind "- all of this is" rather unimaginatively composed of typical male characteristics ".

Oliver Jung's review in particular shows numerous other advantages of the film. The contrasting scenes, for example, in which one experiences the protagonists once in exuberance and at other times in petty squabble, show just as “trivial as it is true” that “the happy is all happiness, the disappointed all disappointment”. Thematically, the film goes beyond the old question of what “remains of the two” when the two are separated; rather, he is interested in the far bigger problem, "whether an excess of individualism and the expectation of happiness does not stand in the way of relationships today". The director found "coherent images for recapitulating the divergence, which are inherent in a lot of symbolism without annoying". The film music is characterized by "safe taste".

Christian Buß ( Der Spiegel ) recalls the cinematic context of some music tracks and says, Are you happy? sometimes lean on the kind of “ pop song-driven love and breakup films ” by the British production company Working Title Films : “no moment of happiness or unhappiness without a suitable song”. At the same time, however, he says, the filmmakers of Are you happy? "Answers too simple at the right moments", and he closes his criticism with the sentence: "Why some grow together through their differences and the others are driven apart by their differences remains a mystery even after this love story with its many true moments."

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Claudia Tieschky: Der Liebe last act. Süddeutsche Zeitung , January 1, 2019, accessed on May 3, 2020 .
  2. ↑ a b c d e Oliver Junge: Inventory of a relationship. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , January 2, 2019, accessed on May 3, 2020 .
  3. ↑ Thomas Gehringer: TV film “Are you happy?” Tittelbach.tv , December 14, 2018, accessed on May 3, 2020 .
  4. ↑ Christian Buß : Lies and tender truths. Spiegel online , January 2, 2019, accessed May 3, 2020 .