The nameless day
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The nameless day |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 2017 |
| length | 89 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Volker Schlöndorff |
| script | Volker Schlöndorff |
| production |
Jens C. Susa Martin Choroba |
| music | Gunnar Voigt |
| camera | Tomas Erhart |
| cut | Julia Oehring |
| occupation | |
| |
The nameless day is a TV film by Oscar winner Volker Schlöndorff from 2017 . The crime film is based on the novel of the same name by Friedrich Ani .
action
Chief Inspector Jakob Franck often had to deliver news of death to relatives. After retiring, he hopes to leave this life behind. But the past soon catches up with him - Ludwig Winther, whose wife Doris has just hanged herself because she could not overcome the death of her daughter Esther, blames the inspector for her death. When Franck was still an investigator, he had not been able to solve the death of seventeen-year-old Esther Winther. She was found hanging from a tree in the city park two years ago. At the time, there were no serious signs of outside interference, but also no obvious reason for suicide.
Winthers desperation leads Franck to take on the case again. According to evidence at the time, there were suspicions against a neighbor, the dentist Dr. Jordan, which however did not harden. In contrast, Esther had recently turned to the gothic scene and dealt with death and transience as well as the resulting self-staging. After Franck talks to one of Esther's friends and finds a handwritten note from Esther's mother at Winther, on which it says to her husband: "I don't want to see you anymore", Franck has to consider that Ludwig Winther abused his daughter could. So the superintendent visits Doris Winther's sister to get a better picture. Inge Nemetzki lives in Berlin and reports that her niece often came to see her, but always alone. She cannot imagine sexual abuse of her brother-in-law and does not consider it likely, she would have noticed during her conversations with Esther.
In Franck's attempt to reconstruct the time before Esther's death, he also asks her friend, whom he somewhat accuses of possibly having let Esther down when she needed her most. Franck speaks of Esther's noticeably frequent visits to Dr. Jordan and now learns that she was so often with her neighbor because of Jordan's son Patrick. She liked the boy and saw in him the younger brother, whom she never had herself. Her father would never have abused her. Still, there were rumors that Esther's mother believed more than her husband. Only later did she find out that the allegations against her husband were fabricated and so she felt complicit in the destruction of her family.
Franck is now looking for Dr. Jordan up. He tells him that Patrick is not his son, but his nephew, whom he adopted after his brother went to jail for the murder of Patrick's mother. The boy had seen his mother die at the age of five. Patrick notices Franck's visit and that he was asking about Esther. Patrick follows the inspector and speaks to him on the street. He tells Franck that he had seen everything: he went to the city park with Esther. She wanted to show him how to scare people. To do this, she would have made a loop in the rope that supposedly could not be pulled and one would then only "dangle in the rope". Then Esther climbed the tree with the rope around her neck and then slipped. Since a knot at the end of the rope got stuck in a fork of a branch, Esther had broken her neck despite the open loop.
Franck informs Winther that Esther's death was just an unfortunate accident and that no one is directly to blame for it.
background
The film was shot from February 27, 2017 to March 31, 2017 in Erfurt, Berlin and Potsdam. The premiere took place on October 9, 2017 at the Hamburg Film Festival .
reception
Reviews
Rainer Tittelbach from tittelbach.tv judged with appreciation: “'The nameless day' has everything that could turn the film into a crime thriller, but in truth it is far more than that. A small masterpiece. The honor goes to Friedrich Ani, who wrote the wonderfully meandering novel, and Volker Schlöndorff, who gave this film a concentrated, yet pleasantly relaxed narrative rhythm. The author-director moves confidently in space and time. Just like the main character: She is the measure of all things in this humanly insightful and gripping film narration. "
At the time , Christoph Schröder wrote: "Muted colors, sagging shoulders, which are supposed to symbolize the burden of the world and your own inadequacy: If there were the designation gray-in-gray film, the nameless day would be the perfect representative of this genre."
Christopher Schmitt wrote forquotemeter.de : “Stylistically, the gloomy setting immediately catches the eye. Although this can be considered typical for comparable crime novels, it is particularly demonstrative and effective in this case. The characters' desperation is captured in cold images. Evening and night scenes in moderately lit apartments or dark Berlin corner pubs, the dark, heavy atmosphere is emphasized at all locations. There are only a few flashbacks that contrast with this, which have been kept so bright that they appear intentionally overexposed. "
“Schlöndorff is the man for film adaptations, crime novels are actually not his specialty. Based on Friedrich Ani's submission, he wrote a first draft of the script within three weeks, even unsure whether the genre suits him. [...] The result is a film that has more of Schlöndorff than Anis' ingenious way of creating a lot of atmosphere with just a few words. There is a lot of what you know from the films of the 1970s and 80s. [...] People of the Netflix generation are likely to have their problems with the slow tone and some inconvenience and wish something might happen. "
Audience rating
The first broadcast of Der namenlose Tag on February 5, 2018 was seen by 5.85 million viewers in Germany and achieved a market share of 18.0% for ZDF .
Awards
- Romy Awards 2018 - Award in the categories Best Director TV Film and Best Image Creation TV Film
- Grimme Prize 2019 - nomination in the fiction categories
Web links
- The unnamed day in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The anti-crime thriller at Frankfurter Neue Presse
- The nameless day press kit of the ZDF
- The nameless day. Crime based on the novel of the same name by Friedrich Ani. In: TV movie of the week. Second German television , accessed on February 4, 2018 (official site for the film).
Individual evidence
- ↑ The nameless day at crew united
- ^ ZDF at the Hamburg Film Festival 2017. October 5-14, 2017. In: Press portal. ZDF main communication department, 2017, accessed on February 4, 2018 : "Screening: Monday, October 9, 2017, 7 p.m., CinemaxX 3"
- ^ Rainer Tittelbach : Thieme, Striesow, Lardi, Amarell, Ani, Schlöndorff. Seduction to the truth (ssuche) at tittelbach.tv , accessed on March 5, 2018.
- ↑ Christoph Schröder: A man for all the dead at zeit.de , accessed on March 5, 2018.
- ↑ Christopher Schmitt: The unnamed day at Quotenmeter.de , accessed on 5 March 2018th
- ↑ Hans Hoff: Television the Schlöndorff way. In: Media. Süddeutsche Zeitung, February 4, 2018, accessed on April 7, 2018 .
- ↑ Manuel Weis: Primetime Check: Monday, February 5, 2018.quotemeter.de , February 6, 2018, accessed on April 7, 2018 .
- ^ Kurier: The winners of the Akademie-Romy 2018 . Article dated April 5, 2018, accessed April 6, 2018.
- ↑ 55th Grimme Prize 2019. The nameless day (Provobis for ZDF). In: Nominations. Grimme Institute, accessed on February 26, 2019 .