The Ortlieb women
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The Ortlieb women |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1981 |
| length | 113 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Luc Bondy |
| script |
Libgart Schwarz , Luc Bondy, Ellen Hammer |
| production |
Joachim von Vietinghoff , Bernd Eichinger |
| music | Peer ravens |
| camera | Ricardo Aronovich |
| cut | Stefan Arnsten |
| occupation | |
| |
Die Ortliebschen Frauen is a 1979 German feature film by Luc Bondy with Edith Heerdegen , Libgart Schwarz and Elisabeth Stepanek in the title roles. The drama is based on Franz Nabl's novel “The Grave of the Living” .
action
The Ortlieb women are mainly mother Helene Ortlieb and her two daughters Josefine and Anna, whom the recently different head of the Ortlieb family leaves behind in great mental confusion. This can already be seen at the beginning of the story, when the three Ortlieb ladies return from the funeral and drive around the door lock, both nervous and distraught, when it cannot be opened immediately. When they finally get into the apartment, they immediately seek shelter in the dark. The three Ortlieb women and son Walter believe that they urgently need this protection, because the bereaved instinctively feel that the death of their father or husband threatens to crumble the long-crumbling family ties.
Helene Ortlieb is like a fragile elf: incapable of living, wandering around, a bit strange and like out of this world. With the death of her husband, she takes refuge in a helplessness and pretended confusion that insinuates old age dementia. Son Walter, a lonely musician with crippled feet, lives in his snail shell and can be described as shy, almost shy, due to his disability. The younger daughter Anna is also rather introverted and transfers her loving care to a bird. The older of the Ortlieb daughters, Josefine, feels compelled to take over the reins of the business. Firmly and energetically she tries to organize the things of the family and, trapped in a constant control, protection and alarm mode, to keep everything away from the Ortlieb that could even be perceived as a threat.
The enemy is lurking in her eyes everywhere: in the form of a bird feeder who approaches and woos the younger sister, definitely to Anna's pleasure, in the form of Walter's tender attempts to escape, whom Josefine is beginning to regulate more and more and this with the necessary well-being of the weak mother justified. It is becoming increasingly clear that Josefine intends to compensate for her own fears of loss in her hectic activism, which she justifies with the struggle for family cohesion. While Anna gradually begins to submit to Josefine's mania for control, Walter, who is employed at a bank, continues to try to preserve his little freedoms. When Josefine learns that Walter is said to have started a relationship with a colleague, the sisters take the ultimate emergency measure and lock their own brother - for "his own good", of course - in the in-house cellar to keep him there forever protect the hostile world out there.
Production notes
Die Ortliebschen Frauen , a film-television coproduction, was the first feature film by the theater maker Bondy. It was created between September 27 and November 12, 1979 in Berlin (West) , Vienna and Heiligenkreuz in Burgenland ( Austria ). The film premiered on May 15, 1981 in Hamburg .
Reviews
“Luc Bondy's film, which is set in a strangely timeless world of petty bourgeoisie fading on the edge of the present, shows the destructive power of a longing for what is preserved,” said Der Spiegel in its May 18, 1981 issue, and concluded that it presented “the bourgeois idyll as a horror and hell vision. "
Die Zeit announced in the headline: “No work, no masterpiece” and summed up: “No, cinema is not what ... Libgart Schwarz is showing. So inconspicuously shrill, so cautiously eccentric, so moonstruck and inconsiderate you can't behave in front of a camera ... but a first film that makes you want to see the second. "
In Films 1981–84 it is said that the film is "ambitious in terms of acting and musical dramaturgy, but largely manneristically exaggerated ... lengthy and bloodless". Stage director Bondy was assumed to have made this film "with a penetrating stubbornness of the conventions of the theater".
Web links
- The Ortlieb women at filmportal.de
- The Ortlieb Women in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Film Critics in: Der Spiegel, 21/1981
- ^ Film review in: Die Zeit from May 22, 1981
- ^ Films 1981-84. Handbook XI of the Catholic Film Critics. Critical notes on four years of cinema and television. Verlag Katholisches Institut für Medieninformation, 1985. S. 275