The housewife's flower

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Movie
Original title The housewife's flower
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1998
length 92 minutes
Rod
Director Dominik Wessely
script Dominik Wessely
production Michael Jungfleisch
music Oliver Biehler
camera Knut Schmitz
cut Raimund Barthelmes

The Housewife's Flower is a German documentary from 1998. Directed by Dominik Wessely .

action

The Housewife's Flower tells of the everyday life of a group of vacuum cleaner representatives from the Vorwerk company who are trying, with varying degrees of success, to sell carpet cleaning equipment to their customers. The film, which was shot in the Stuttgart area in the run-up to Christmas 1997, focuses more and more on two protagonists: the sales professional Steffen Widule and the young professional Angelo Ditta. While Steffen Widule closes the business year as the best in the region and is awarded a trophy at the Christmas party, the novice Angelo Ditta gets more and more into a crisis during the course of the film, which finally leads him to the realization that the “business is not for him is ".

General

The Housewife's Flower clearly refers to a key work of American direct cinema , namely the 1969 film Salesmen by David and Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin . In both films, a group of sales representatives is the focus of interest, and in both films is true the filmmaker's focus is more and more on a protagonist who fails in his profession. In Salesmen it is the Bible seller Paul Brennan who gets into a sales crisis; in The Housewife's Flower , the young salesman Angelo Ditta finally gives up the business. Although the thematic borrowings from Salesmen cannot be overlooked, Dominik Wessely's documentary goes far beyond a mere remake. The formal design of the film reveals that the director reflects on the impact of his role model just as he plays with set pieces from genre cinema or quotes from film history. For example, the obviously staged opening sequence in which Wessely lets his five protagonists play in a men's room is very reminiscent of a sequence from Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs . The film music by Oliver Biehler , composed especially for the film, also plays with motifs that seem familiar from Mafia or gangster films. In the final sequence, in which the vacuum cleaner representatives in their black coats swarm into the sunset like cowboys, one of them whistles the theme song from Sergio Leone's western Two Glorious Scoundrels .

The Housewife's Flower premiered at the 32nd Hof International Film Festival in 1998 and quickly became a cult film that is still very popular with both audiences and critics. In the course of the theatrical release, the film reached around 70,000 cinema viewers. At the end of the 1990s, German cinema mainly found an audience with documentaries that dealt with pop-cultural phenomena in the broadest sense (e.g. Blue Note , directed by Julian Benedikt from 1997) or portraying well-known personalities ( My favorite enemy , directed by: Werner Herzog, 1999), Wessely managed to arouse the interest of a large audience for unknown protagonists and their stories with the humorous everyday story The Flower of the Housewife . The fact that The Housewife's Flower was shown every day for more than a year in the Lupe art house in Stuttgart also contributed to its reputation as a cult film . More than 20,000 viewers saw the film in this cinema alone. On July 27, 1999, as part of the 7th Ludwigsburg Summer Night Open Air Cinema, a sold out performance took place, which was attended by more than 3000 spectators.

Reviews

“Wessely (...) follows a team of five representatives at every turn. And through many glances in the living room and under the sofas, a striking social study emerges, which is also probably the funniest German film in recent years. ”Jakob Hesler, taz Hamburg, February 6, 2003.

“The Housewife's Flower is not, as the title suggests, a German comedy, but a documentary about five vacuum cleaner representatives in Swabian. It was made by the young director Dominik Wessely. And it worked so well that it was treated as a cult film at the Hof Film Festival. (...) Wessely ... stages his protagonists and secondary actors in such a way that their natural wit comes to the fore. Everything is there that makes a good feature film: suspense, comedy, sympathy. And emotion. ”Susanna Nieder, Tagesspiegel, June 17, 1999

"Without voiceover or interviews, but with an excellent soundtrack, documentary filmmaker Dominik Wessely succeeds in eliciting the laconic dramaturgy of a spaghetti western from the facial expressions, gestures and conversations of real life." Iris Depping, tip Berlin, 13/1999

"Dominik Wessely hit the bull's eye with his enthusiasm for experimentation." Heike Kühn, epd Film 6/99

“Dominik Wessely's documentation of this sect cosmos is flawless, the tragic overtones of the conditions presented are played out in the use of music (and a sophisticated dramaturgy), as is the sad comedy, which is, however, ultimately always bitter. (...) The loser , the only figure with whom one can sympathize, (...) stands for the fact that within this false sectarian life there cannot be a real one. The fateful connection shown is total. ”Ekkehard Knörer, jump cut

Trivium

The film is referenced by Thorsten Lannert in Tatort Anne and Death .

Publications

  • Christina Bruns: Contemporary German Documentary Cinema (1999–2007): the Rural Represented, the Regional Defamiliarized and Heimat Revived . PhD Thesis, The University of Edinburgh 2010 ( PDF; 6.2 MB )

Web links