The aphid
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The aphid |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1991 |
| length | 87 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Claudia Prietzel |
| script | Claudia Prietzel |
| production | Südwestfunk / Westdeutscher Rundfunk |
| music | Christoph Oertel |
| camera | Johannes Hollmann |
| occupation | |
| |
Die Blattlaus is a German television film by director Claudia Prietzel , which was broadcast as a television play in 1991 .
action
It is Sunday afternoon in a Dortmund workers' settlement. The first scenes of the film show the 46-year-old construction worker Walter Zielinski, who is on his way home on his moped with a bowl of whipped cream in his left hand. He still lives with his parents, while his siblings have long since started their own families. At home he meets his ten-year-old niece Marina, who is visiting for four weeks during the summer holidays.
As he gets off the moped behind the house, he sees a broken flower in the garden. He picks the flower and discovers an aphid infestation . He hastily grinds some of the aphids between his fingers.
A big family get-together with coffee and cake takes place in the parents' house, for which the whipped cream was needed. You can tell that Walter is an outsider in the family. He is not taken seriously and ordered around. He only gets along well with his niece. When the visit is gone, both of them sit in front of the house in the evening and look at the starry sky. In his room he later wrote a note to his father that he would lose his job at the end of the month, but then crumpled up the note.
The next morning his niece watches as he makes his morning coffee and takes sedative pills. When she knocks on the window, the coffee pot falls from his hand in shock. Wakened by the noise, his father rushes over and looks at him reproachfully, whereupon Walter wordlessly hands him a banknote for the damage done.
In the morning you can see Walter building a wall very accurately on the construction site. However, its low work rate is also the reason for his dismissal. His polishing admits he paused conversation that he dismissal has still not told his father.
After work, Walter drives his hungry niece to a nearby snack bar, which is no longer in operation. So they drive on to the snack stand of his former school friend Bruno. In conversation one learns something about Walter's family situation. He has four sisters. Marina is the daughter of his sister Inge, with whom Bruno was once in love.
On his last day at work, Walter receives a visit from his niece on the construction site. Violating the safety rules will result in his being released immediately. At home, by reading newspaper articles about mass layoffs, he tries to prepare his father for the announcement of his dismissal, but he does not want to know anything about it. So Walter decides to return to work on the construction site the next morning, as he does every day. He offers to work for free. But they only put up with that for a few days, because his wage dumping annoys his former colleagues and he is no longer insured.
At home, his father is annoyed that he has still not cut the hedge and throws Walter's tablets in the trash. Marina finds them in the bin and hides them in the rabbit hutch.
The situation at the construction site is coming to a head, so that Walter is now being led from the construction site by police force and brought home. There his father beats him up so that Walter decides to spend the night in the garden shed. When he is desperately looking for his pills that night, Marina, who had woken up, brings him the pills from the rabbit hutch.
The next day, the father goes looking for a new job for Walter. He talks unsuccessfully to his former foreman, lets Walter call up various newspaper advertisements and also places an advertisement himself; but without success. After a failed "escape attempt", Walter overdoses his pills. However, Marina finds him in the garden shed and saves his life.
While Walter locks himself up in his room, Marina is caught by her grandfather trying to bury a dead rabbit in the garden that had been eating from the pills. Marina flees from home and is now desperately wanted by everyone. Walter has an inspiration and finds Marina in the abandoned snack bar. In conversation with her, he makes the decision to rebuild the snack bar and sell sausages in the future. When he and Marina appear in the parents' house that evening, he is the hero of the day.
Walter tries to put his idea into practice. He negotiated, albeit unsuccessfully, with the former owner of the booth to buy it. His father has other plans anyway and uses his savings to "buy" him a job in a hardware store, where he is supposed to count and pack screws. On the side, however, Walter continues to pursue his business idea. Together with Marina he explores the sales at his friend Bruno's sausage stand and counts the passers-by who pass the abandoned stand in the course of a day. There are clearly not enough. A mobile ice cream vendor cycling past gives him the idea of becoming mobile himself and actively visiting his customers with a sales van.
In laborious nighttime work, he builds a rolling snack stand as a trailer for his moped. During an argument with his new boss, he finds out that his father bought him his job and quits without notice. When his father tries to beat him up again for this, he defends himself for the first time, whereupon his father leaves him puzzled. He realizes that his son is now on the way to becoming what he has always asked for: a "real Zielinski".
At the end of the film you can see Walter supplying the former construction site with his mobile booth: Subscription sausages - his business idea. His colleagues are very impressed and want to provide him with recipes for potato salad and desserts. In the evening he launches a New Year's Eve rocket outside the city gates to celebrate his new beginning.
Location
The shooting took place in the Müsersiedlung , a colliery colony in Dortmund.
reception
In 2013, the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung included the film on the list of films worth seeing in the Ruhr Area, which included a total of 40 films.
Web links
- The aphid in theInternet Movie Database(English)