Let's go!

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Movie
Original title Let's go!
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 2014
Rod
Director Michael Verhoeven
script Michael Verhoeven based on the novel by Laura Waco
production Ernst Ludwig Ganzert and Mario Krebs
music Manu short
camera Wolfgang Aichholzer
cut Romy Schumann
occupation
Maxim Mehmet, Alice Dwyer, Michael Verhoeven, Naomi Krauss and Deborah Kios during the shooting

Let's go! is a German television film by Michael Verhoeven from 2014. It tells the life story of Laura Waco, who grew up in post-war Germany in Borstei , a residential area in Munich.

action

The 21-year-old Laura is returning to her home town Munich from the USA because her father and sister Friede have had a car accident. Her father died in the accident and her sister is in a coma with little chance of recovery. Laura remembers many moments in her life and grapples with the fact that her mother is still unable to hug her.

She tries to fathom her Jewish roots. She visits Friede in the hospital several times and approaches her mother. Her life in Germany is told in flashbacks before she emigrated to America as an adult.

Laura is born to two Jewish concentration camp survivors. She first grew up in Freising , where her parents run an inn, which they run in the Bavarian tradition without offering kosher food. They settle down with the rural population.

They later move to the Borstei residential district in Munich, which is located directly on Dachauer Strasse. It was there that she found out for the first time that her parents were Jewish. She makes an unusual friendship with the American Lucy. She is beaten up by a GI when she presents her bare bust to the male residents of the neighborhood. She finds her childhood love in the Jewish boy next door, until he emigrates to the USA. During a vacation in Italy, she met 39-year-old Thomas Kordt, another love. Her father, however, is against this connection, so the two of them never get married.

Again and again there is violence in the film, for example her father beats her several times. His hand also slips on vacation in Italy when Laura criticizes her mother for wearing a bikini on the beach in her unfavorable figure. She justifies her bad figure with her stay in the concentration camp. What leads to an argument because Laura has never been to the camp and she criticizes her mother for it. In response, her father slaps her on the face. She replies that he will never hit her again.

Laura only learns about the atrocities that happened in the concentration camp through her aunt Ida. She tells her that she pulled her mother out of a mountain of corpses in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Laura's mother held a dead baby in her arms. She held it so tight that Ida had to snatch it from her. This explains why her mother couldn't hug her. Only at the funeral does her mother ask Laura for forgiveness and the two embrace.

During the film, her father said the phrase “Let's go” several times. This was the sentence a US soldier said to her father when he freed him from the concentration camp. The film ends with the liberation scene.

background

Let's go! was shot from July 30th to September 19th 2013 in Munich and Italy and first broadcast on October 10th 2014 on Das Erste .

criticism

Tilmann P. Gangloff wrote for Kino.de : “Alice Dwyer is a wonderful cast for the adult Laura, but also her deputies in the flashbacks are aptly selected and wonderfully managed. The performance of Maxim Mehmet as Laura's father is no less splendid. ”“ The actual narrative of the film, however, takes place in the background: the emotional thread of the story is Laura's unconscious search for her identity. ”“ Despite the serious topic, there is always again surprisingly cheerful moments, and the moving epilogue finally explains why 'Let's go!' Majer's life motto has become. "

At SZ , Joachim Käppner said: “In his good moments, Let's go! In a poignant way, the fact that the speechlessness was not only on the perpetrators' side like a suffocating poison on the families, up to the rebellion of the 68er, which demanded accountability from the older generation. Many of the survivors also had secrets and taboos. The traumas of the parents that were never dealt with became an emotional burden for the children as well. ”At times“ the film runs the risk of being well meant rather than well done. Jewish life then appears almost as a caricature, which is also due to the fact that not all actors really credibly reproduce the Yiddish-influenced German of many survivors from Eastern Europe. "

Rainer Tittelbach from tittelbach.tv came to the conclusion: “What begins with heavy blood develops into a somewhat different Bavarian moral history, determined by the innocent gaze of the post-Holocaust generation, who cannot hide the trauma of the parents' generation. Alice Dwyer is the mood barometer, the link between the times, her look brings you closer to history. Your figure takes a painful path to Jewish identity. "

In Der Tagesspiegel Joachim Huber wrote: "The film is not meant to easy consumption. He can't, he doesn't want to. ,Let's go!' looks for reasons and events in the past. This happens in a demanding drama with retrospectives and side glances. The viewer has to concentrate, to stay tuned to find out what was through the film narration, to know what is. "

Awards

In 2014 Let's go! nominated at the Munich Film Festival in the New German Television category. In 2015 he was awarded the prize for the best stage design by Bettina Catharina Proske at the Deutsche Akademie für Fernsehen .

Web links

Commons : Let's go!  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b shooting and broadcast dates at crew-united.com, accessed on November 16, 2018.
  2. ^ Film review at Kino.de , accessed on November 16, 2018.
  3. ↑ Joachim Käppner: Impotence of Words at sueddeutsche.de , accessed on November 16, 2018.
  4. ^ Rainer Tittelbach : Alice Dwyer, Krauss, Nesytowa, Mehmet, Michael Verhoeven. “I'm a Jew!” At tittelbach.tv , accessed on November 16, 2018.
  5. ↑ Joachim Huber: "Nazi, Nazi" at tagesspiegel.de , accessed on November 16, 2018.