Lara (2019)

Movie
Original title	Lara
Country of production	Germany
original language	German
Publishing year	2019
length	98 minutes
Age rating	FSK 0
Rod
Director	Jan-Ole Gerster
script	Blaž Kutin
production	Marcos Kantis
music	Arash Safaian
camera	Frank Griebe
cut	Isabel Meier
occupation
	Corinna Harfouch : Lara Jenkins; Tom Schilling : Viktor Jenkins; Rainer Bock : Paul Jenkins, Viktor's father; Volkmar Kleinert : Prof. Reinhoffer; André Jung : Mr. Czerny; Gudrun Ritter : Lara's mother; Mala Emde : Johanna; Hildegard Schroedter : Marion; Kathleen Morgeneyer : Katharina; Birge Schade : Rebecca; Maria Dragus : Clara; Mark Filatov : Tobi; Barbara Philipp : Barbara; Steffen Jürgens : Jürgen; Tina Pfurr : Steffi; Hendrik von Bültzingslöwen : Frank; Till Butterbach : Silvio;

Lara is a film drama by Jan-Ole Gerster that was released in German cinemas on November 7, 2019.

action

Lara Jenkins' son Viktor is supposed to give the most important piano concert of his career on the evening of her sixtieth birthday. She should be happy about it, because after all it was she who encouraged his musical career. However, because she has not reached her son for weeks and believes she will not be welcome to the premiere, she buys all the remaining tickets for the concert and gives them away to everyone she meets that day.

Lara could have become a piano prodigy, but she was never good enough. At least that's what she thinks after she once embarrassed her parents in public. Instead, she devoted all of her energy to the musical training of her son Victor. Both her ex-husband and her mother had repeatedly reprimanded Lara for taking him too hard.

production

Staff and funding

It is in Lara to Jan-Ole Gerster's directorial debut after his successful debut Oh Boy , which won six Lolas. The script was written by the Slovenian author, photo artist and filmmaker Blaž Kutin , who had written the story a few years earlier. After Gerster had read this, he said he fell in love immediately: "It felt like something familiar that I would have liked to have written myself." Like Oh Boy , Lara also plays on one day in Berlin. Regarding the changes from Kutin's original script, Gerster noted that the story originally set in Ljubljana because Blaz is Slovenian and was still living there when he started writing it. With the translation to another city, a few minor changes were needed. Was produced Lara again from Marcos Kantis for Zhivago film in co-production with Studio Canal .

The film received production funding from the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg in the amount of 600,000 euros and from the Filmförderungsanstalt in the amount of 350,000 euros, as well as project film funding from the German Film Funding Fund of 478,000 euros and young talent from the Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung in the amount of 250,000 euros.

Cast and filming

Corinna Harfouch can be seen in the title role of Lara Jenkins, Tom Schilling plays her son Victor. Rainer Bock plays Lara's ex-husband, Gudrun Ritter her mother, Volkmar Kleinert her old piano teacher. Other roles were cast with Hildegard Schroedter , Susanne Bredehöft , André Jung and Mala Emde .

The shooting took place from mid-October 2017 to February 24, 2018 in Berlin , Leipzig and Weimar . Frank Griebe acted as cameraman .

Film music and soundtrack

Tom Schilling plays Lara's son Viktor

The film music and the piano concerto were composed by Arash Safaian . In an interview with epd Film , the director explains that he had the idea of composing the piece that Tom Schilling presented at the concert in such a way that the actor could play the beginning himself: “We also thought it was fitting that it wasn't so virtuoso begins to be something other than the perfection that his mother hammered into it for years. There should be something childishly naive about it, which corresponds to the idea that the piece is also about the relationship with his mother in the broadest sense. ”For Gerster, this also has something to do with the act of cutting the cord from his mother. The soundtrack was recorded by the German-Japanese pianist Alice Sara Ott and the German Chamber Orchestra Berlin. The Toccata in C major , Op. 7 by Robert Schumann plays Sviatoslav Richter . The soundtrack, which comprises a total of 14 pieces of music, was released as a download by Deutsche Grammophon at the end of October 2019 .

The song Il jouait du piano debout (standing he played the piano) by the French singer France Gall is a recurring motif in the film, which is a counterpart to the classic film music. Jan-Ole Gerster explained : "France Gall's song Il jouait du piano debout " is fittingly also about a pianist who rebels. For me, the longing of the song is also a kind of meta-comment about Lara, who secretly longs for a new beginning. "

publication

At the end of June and beginning of July 2019 the film was shown in the official competition at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival and celebrated its world premiere here. At the beginning of the first week of July 2019, Lara celebrated its German premiere at the Munich Film Festival , where the film will be shown in the New German Cinema section. At the end of August 2019 it will be presented at the Festival of German Films . In early October 2019 it will be presented at the London Film Festival . Beta Cinema has taken over global sales. It was released in German cinemas on November 7, 2019, after being presented at the Leipzig Film Art Fair in September 2019 . At the end of August 2020, the film was presented at the Molodist International Film Festival , which took place in a hybrid version.

reception

Reviews

Peter Debruge from Variety writes that director Jan-Ole Gerster shows, although he has his title character opened a window of their apartment in the opening sequence and ready to jump on a chair, in the further course of the film that he does not shock, but rather deals with the conflict Figure wanted to create a portrait of remarkable depth over the span of a day. Lara is not dissimilar to the sadomasochistic figure who in Michael Haneke's The Piano Player puts sharp-edged glass splinters in a student's coat pocket and is played by Isabelle Huppert . But the damage Lara inflicts here is purely psychological, and Gerster's approach is nowhere near as bitter; therefore Corinna Harfouch seems less like a German version of Mary Kay Place than Huppert in this role .

Marta Balaga from the online cinema magazine Cineuropa does not describe Lara as a monster either. More than just a movie about mothers' ambitions, Lara is also a commentary on how women are raised to always look up to others, crave acceptance, and acknowledge that they really deserve that top spot or attention.

In his review for the film service , Rüdiger Suchsland writes that Lara is a very unusual work about art, about family and loneliness, and a film about the attempt to recapture a lost life. The editing by Isabel Meier sensitively arranges these multi-faceted impressions into concise moments of sensation, and Frank Griebe's camera reveals a forgotten old West Berlin that shimmers alongside the postcard impressions between Kantstrasse and Stuttgarter Platz, Hansaviertel and Ku'damm, above all the The main character's horizon of experience corresponds to a limited one, continued Suchsland.

Corinna Harfouch , here a few months before the start of shooting, can be seen in the title role of Lara Jenkins

Martin Schwickert rated the film as “very good” in the Rheinische Post and said: “ Lara is one of the best German films of this cinema year, especially because Gerster never lets the matter degenerate into a one-woman show, despite the powerful leading actress. Every minor character, no matter how small, is cast with great care and developed into a harmonious character. "

From the German Film and Media Review was Lara with the predicate particularly valuable provided. The reasoning states that Corinna Harfouch is playing one of her most important, if not the biggest, role of her life: “She can be seen in every shot of the film and plays all the sequences with great energy and intensity. You believe that Lara, as she embodies her, can shake the self-confidence of her son so much with a single word that he hardly dares to take the chance of his life, namely the premiere of one of his compositions. This woman seems to be able to see through everything, while her own life turns out to be a huge blind spot for her, and it is precisely this dilemma that forms the tragic core of the film. ”Although its protagonist never vies for the audience's sympathy, you come to her in the course very close to the film and understands how great her pain must be when one realizes with her why she has lived such a wrong life, so on in the explanation.

Visitor numbers

In Germany, Lara started with 33,242 viewers after the first weekend and thus reached number 2 on the arthouse cinema charts. In the following two weeks, the film took first place in the art house box office. The film recorded a total of 186,428 visitors in Germany.