Close (film)

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Movie
Original title Close
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 2004
length 90 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Marcus Lenz
script Dagmar Gabler
Marcus Lenz
production Karsten Aurich ,
Martin Cichy
music Tarwater
camera Reinhold Vorneider
cut Bettina Boehler
occupation

Close is a German film drama from 2004. It describes the states of total introversion and extroversion that clash using the example of the main characters Anna and Jost.

action

The film shows the clash of two extreme characters. Anna suffers from severe depression and has not left the unfurnished apartment in the otherwise empty tenement in Berlin for some time, while Jost wanders the streets, homeless and disaffected, looking for any confrontation. They get to know each other when Jost tries to get into Anna's supposedly empty apartment through the window. Anna notices him and opens the window. Without much communication, Jost also stands at her door the following nights, and Anna, who is desperately looking for closeness, approves of his inaccessible manner. She avoids contact with other people such as her mother and her friend Susanne with excuses. After Jost provoked two railway employees one night until they beat him up, he dragged himself with the last of his strength to Anna, who took care of him in a makeshift way and took advantage of his weakened condition to have sex with him. Jost accepts the situation with hesitant resistance.

The next day he wants to send her to the pharmacy because of severe pain. She takes a long time to ask, and he begins to curse her. When he tries to leave the apartment on his own, she pushes him to the floor and cuffs the unconscious man to a chair. With a gag in his mouth, she lets him sit in the hallway. The next day there is a long postponed appointment with Susanne. Anna dragged Jost into the bedroom, opened the door for her friend and immediately tried to get rid of her again. When Susanne finally tries to open the bedroom door, Anna gets physical and forces her to leave. Jost has long since been able to loosen the gag in his mouth, but remains silent. In the evening Anna puts him and her chair in bed with her and covers him. Then she decides to loosen his bonds and release him. Standing on his own two feet again, Jost packs his bag, but does not leave the apartment, but kicks in the bathroom door, behind which Anna has locked herself. She crouches naked in the bathtub. After she has put her dress back on, he forcibly pulls her to the apartment door, down the stairs to the house exit. Anna almost panics. After a few seconds outside, she runs back up to the apartment. Jost lets them pass with the words “Then die up there!”. He waits a few minutes in front of the house while Anna runs around in her apartment, disheveled.

In the next scene you see Jost stopping a car on the street and forcing the driver to get out. He gets in and gives full throttle. Meanwhile Anna has decided to leave the apartment again. Jost intentionally races against a stone obstacle at top speed. Anna walks through the deserted streets of the night in her coat. In the last scene you can see them both finding each other on a street. It's the same night, but Jost is unharmed.

So the end of the film also suggests that Anna killed herself in her apartment.

background

The music for the film comes from the Berlin Indietronic duo Tarwater .

criticism

“Markus Lenz stages the non-encounter of two unfinished people who have locked themselves in their emotions like in weathered fortresses, as a closed system of signs and strictly according to the director's manual. No element should distract from the basic idea, in which not only the characters, but the entire film is caught like in a corset. Everything works as a doubling underline. [...] In this cosmos, which is perfectly constructed around a principle, the director allows his characters, at best, the emotional life of brake disks: it has to glow all the time, but somehow nothing is moving forward. What a shame."

- Dietmar Kammerer ( taz )

Close is the last tango or the latest craze in a kind of German cinema that directors like Michael Klier and Christian Petzold have achieved in recent years. With a lot of patience and sparse images, they have effectively expressed alienation, but sometimes overestimated its suitability as a film motif. Like them, the dffb graduate Lenz relies primarily on his actors in his quite independent dramaturgy. The seemingly endlessly lost Jule Böwe, the once again impressive Christoph Bach with his manic-focused rogue look - to say they played intensely would be an understatement. But as film characters that cannot be questioned, they remain quite alien to you. "

- Philipp Bühler ( Berliner Zeitung )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Dietmar Kammerer: film review. In: taz , accessed on February 18, 2011
  2. ^ Philipp Bühler: Alone for two . In: Berliner Zeitung , October 6, 2005