Cascade backwards
Kaskade Rückwärts is a German love film by DEFA by Iris Gusner from 1984.
action
Maja Wegner is in her late 30s, lives with her adolescent daughter after the death of her husband in a small house with a yard, works as a dispatcher for motor vehicles and tries to renovate the run-down house in her free time. The daughter is frustrated by her mother's lifestyle and accuses her of devoting her life to “tending the grave”. Maja draws a line under her life and starts again.
She moves with her daughter into an apartment in an old building in a big city and begins retraining. She is employed as a conductor at the Reichsbahn , where she works around the clock with her new colleague Gerd. In her new house community, Maja meets the professor Carola, with whom she becomes friends. Carola first talked her out of the idea of posting a marriage advertisement. She covers Maja with new clothes and takes care of make-up and a new hairstyle. Together they move around the houses and are looking for a suitable partner for Maja. At first he seems to be in the musician Toni, who thinks Maja's voice is beautiful, makes some recordings with her and flirts with her. When Maja realizes that he does this with all of his music students, she drops him.
Only now does she post the marriage advertisement. Of the dozen applicants, there are three to whom Carola replies in Maja's name. The first blind date, however, turns out to be a failure: the staid Brettschneider was encouraged by his mother to reply to the advertisement, is a non-drinker and non-smoker and cannot dance. Maja finally suspects that the right person is closer than she has noticed the whole time: Her colleague Gerd is cautious, a long-time bachelor and believes that he will never want to change his life again, but surprises her with small gifts and proves to be loyal and sensitive. She too approaches him cautiously, gives him a plant on his birthday and makes him rethink his attitude of the I-don't-change-myself-anymore. When her train stops in the open and the youngsters are weaving small wreaths of flowers on the adjacent meadow, Maja admits that she would also like to wear one. While the youngsters reproach her for being too old for that, Gerd appears a short time later with a wreath that he puts on her. They both fall into each other's arms and kiss - they only notice that the train is now leaving without the two conductors when they can no longer catch up with it while running. Together they follow the rails.
production
Kaskade backwards was filmed in 1983 and had its premiere on February 9, 1984 in the Berlin Kino International . The following day the film was released in the GDR cinemas and was shown for the first time on August 2, 1986 on the first program on GDR television . The scenario comes from Roland Kästner and the dramaturgy was in the hands of Dieter Wolf .
Within the film, the title of the film initially refers to equestrian sport - with the help of a backward cascade, the rider can jump off the horse with a roll backwards, even in hopeless situations. In a figurative sense, this also means the new beginning of Majas, who breaks out of her daily routine.
The song Du Schön Handschuhmacherin sung in the film was composed by Christian Kožik . The ambiguous lyrics (“Just a few more years and your most beautiful piece / you push back like a false franc”) comes from François Villon . Kaskade zurück was next to a minor supporting role in Manfred Mosblech's television film Der Mann (1975) and two supporting roles in TV series, the only major film appearance by leading actress Marion Wiegmann, who did not appear in front of the camera again after 1984.
criticism
"Iris Gusner has a talent for eccentric game moments, for burlesque and harlequinads, which is rare in this country," wrote the contemporary criticism of the GDR. Other critics found that Gusner had reached into "the most difficult genre subject" with the film - "[she] apparently got frightened halfway and covered the rest with comparatively despair". Looking back, Frank-Burkhard Habel wrote that with her satirical film Gusner succeeded in “breaking all genre boundaries and unsettling a large number of critics. The amusing, biting film with strong female roles [...] met with a more positive response in the Federal Republic than in the GDR ”.
The film service called Kaskade zurück “a woman's fate balanced between romance and satire with ironic swipes at everyday life in the GDR. The acting of the main actress was excellent. ” Cinema described the film as a“ brisk DEFA film comedy that doesn’t save with ironic swipes at everyday life in the GDR. […] Conclusion: a balanced mixture of romance and satire ”.
The problem of depicting emancipation was also taken up by critics. Alongside Affair (1980) and Das Fahrrad (1982), Kaskade zurück is one of the few DEFA films that clearly address the issue of emancipation. In contrast to z. B. Affair , however, Gusner describes in her film "the limits of emancipation rather than the causes of which a code of norms of social conventions appears." Maja remains "more of an intermediary for a description of the state of society. This shortcoming is no exception. The [DEFA] films of the eighties are increasingly characterized by a lack of distinctive character conflicts and a fear of exaggeration. "
Award
At the National Feature Film Festival of the GDR , Marion Wiegmann was awarded the National Film Prize for Best Actress in 1984.
literature
- F.-B. Habel : The great lexicon of DEFA feature films . Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-89602-349-7 , pp. 313-314 .
Web links
- Cascade backward in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Backwards cascade at filmportal.de
- Backward cascade at the DEFA Foundation
Individual evidence
- ↑ See description of the action on progress-film.de ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Fritz Gehler in: Sonntag , No. 13, 1984.
- ↑ Margit Voss: Take a little risk . In: Film und Fernsehen , No. 3, 1984, p. 12.
- ↑ F.-B. Habel : The great lexicon of DEFA feature films . Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-89602-349-7 , pp. 314 .
- ↑ Backward cascade. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
- ↑ See cinema.de
- ↑ Elke Schieber: Beginning of the End or Continuity of Suspicion 1980 to 1989 . In: Ralf Schenk (Red.), Filmmuseum Potsdam (Hrsg.): The second life of the film city Babelsberg. DEFA feature films 1946–1992 . Henschel, Berlin 1994, pp. 267-268.
- ↑ See film-zeit.de ( Memento of the original from August 8, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
