The beautiful days of Aranjuez (2016)

Movie
German title	The beautiful days of Aranjuez
Original title	Les beaux jours d'Aranjuez
Country of production	Germany , France
original language	French
Publishing year	2017
length	97 minutes
Rod
Director	Wim Wenders
script	Wim Wenders, ; Peter Handke
production	Paulo Branco
music	Nick Cave
camera	Benoît Debie
cut	Beatrice Babin
occupation
	Reda Kateb : Man; Sophie Semin : Ms.; Jens Harzer : writer; Peter Handke : himself, gardener; Nick Cave : himself;

The beautiful days of Aranjuez is a feature film by Wim Wenders based on the two-person play of the same name by Peter Handke . The premiere was on September 1, 2016 in Venice , where the film was nominated for a Golden Lion , but received no award. The German premiere took place on January 26, 2017 during the Hof Film Festival. It is the third film after Pina (2011) and Every Thing Will Be Fine (2015) that Wenders shot in 3D .

The title of the film and von Handke's play, slightly modified, take up the winged opening words of Schiller's drama Don Carlos. Infant von Spain said: “The beautiful days in Aranjuez are now over.” Schiller was referring to the royal summer residence in Aranjuez , Spain . In the figurative sense, “beautiful days in Aranjuez” have sometimes been used since then for a carefree time.

content

The film takes place on a summer's day in the garden of an old villa near Paris. After a long tracking shot in the early morning through a deserted Paris - one hears You Keep Me Hangin 'On - one arrives at the villa. The silhouette of Paris can be seen on the horizon, the garden is in full bloom.

A man and a woman sit at a garden table under a pergola and talk to each other or past each other. The couple probably have a common history, they share memories, and they talk about all sorts of topics: The first sexual experiences, generally about relationships between men and women, whereby the man's persistent questions give direction to the conversation. Gradually, the different ideas and perceptions a man and a woman have about life emerge.

A writer sits at a table in the garden room, the door of which opens wide onto the terrace, and types what he overhears into an old mechanical typewriter. Music comes from a Wurlitzer in the hallway, or from a piano where Nick Cave is sitting and playing. Once the gardener comes into the picture - Peter Handke in a cameo - and cuts the bushes.

production

The film is a low budget production and was shot in ten days. The location was - next to Parisian Avenues - a 19th century villa in the Île-de-France within sight of Paris. Peter Handke wrote his play in French for his wife Sophie Semin, and it was also filmed in French. Sophie Semin plays the woman in the film and is dubbed by Eva Mattes . Jens Harzer played the nameless man in Luc Bondy's Vienna premiere of the play in 2012 . The film is Wenders' sixth collaboration (including Handke's film The Absence of 1992) with Peter Handke.

Benoît Debie had already worked with Wenders in his first 3D film. The camera team Benoît Debie / Josephine Derobe ( stereography ) worked with a Red Epic Dragon . The complete post-production was carried out with the assistance of Philipp Orgassa at ARRI Media .

criticism

The criticism of the film was mixed: “most boring film of all time”, “dust-dry film” or “plein-air painting with the camera” and “complex cinematic masterpiece”.

Andreas Rosenfelder from welt.de describes in his "Hymn to the most boring film of all time" how he fell into a "state of comforting paralysis" in the film, in which almost nothing happened, "and still in 3D" . For the critic of Critic.de the blooming summer garden is “the scene of a strangely lifeless staged dialogue” and you can feel the “unpleasant undertaking of turning this dialogue into a didactic piece about men and women”. Everything in the film is sad, anxious, stressed; the lightness of summer there, [...] on the whole a “dust-dry” film.

Sascha Westphal from NRZ calls the film a "quiet masterpiece" and then reflects on the magic of cinema , which Wim Wenders pays homage to in his radical, playful film adaptation of "Schönen Tage in Aranjuez". He sees the monologues and dialogues of the two protagonists as part of a “complex film poem” that draws its lyrical power from his images. Bettina Schulte from the Badische Zeitung also addresses the sound and image design of the film in her overall positive review. The sound of the film is at least as formative as the 3D technology so valued by Wenders, the “restless camera” that surrounds the two of them in the loggia, watching them: It's like plein-air painting with the camera.