Long Hello & Short Goodbye

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Movie
Original title Long Hello & Short Goodbye
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1999
length 91 minutes
Age rating FSK from 16
Rod
Director Rainer Kaufmann
script Jeff Vintar, Martin Rauhaus
production Letterbox Film, Warner Bros. , Henrik Meyer, André Fahning
music Fetish Bergmann and Marco Meister (Fetish & Master)
camera Klaus Eichhammer
cut Ueli Christians
occupation

Long Hello and Short Goodbye is a detective film by director Rainer Kaufmann from 1999 in the style of film noir . The location is Hamburg .

action

The plot of the film is told as a flashback. In a jewel heist, unforeseen things happen and a shootout occurs. The background to this is as follows: The undercover investigator Melody is supposed to arrest the tank and vault cracker Ben for her boss Kahnich, i.e. bring him to prison in the long term. Ben is to be released from prison and, in Kahnich's opinion, would soon commit another crime. But Kahnich, so the story goes, did not succeed in getting him behind bars. Melody's job is now to get him out of prison so that he can be arrested in a new coup. To do this, Melody arranges a meeting with the nouveau riche Uncle Percy and Aunt Aurelia, who do illegal business themselves and speculate on their money. It is agreed to steal the stolen diamonds a second time from their safe, which is, however, empty. The plan goes wrong. Before the transaction, Ben contacted Ida, who was undercover in front of Melody Kahnich's. She still has an account to pay at Kahnich and is ready to help Ben. In the final showdown in the luxurious villa of Percy and Aurelia, those with whom Kahnich had already dealt in the case or the coup before it meet: Melody, Ben, his accomplice Denis, Ida, as well as Percy and Aurelia. Everything is getting out of hand as nothing is going according to plan. The whole coup, the transaction, was initiated by Kahnich, who wanted to finish off Ben out of an injured sense of honor and revenge.

Besides the crime story, “Long Hello & Short Goodbye” is also the love story of Melody and Ben. Because while the case develops or unfolds, it is inevitable that Melody falls in love with Ben and there are romantic and erotic scenes, until Ben finds out that Melody is an undercover police officer. However, this happens at a time when neither he nor Melody can get out of the case.

Style and structure

The story is told in flashbacks as we know it from film noir . It is not without reason that director Rainer Kaufmann names or rather classifies his film under the name of Neo-Noir . Only gradually does the network of relationships between the characters come to light, especially through scenes that happened before the actual plot. The viewer's task is to put the plot together like in a puzzle in order to arrive at a coherent, logical whole.

Reviews

“Melody, as an undercover agent, is supposed to win the trust of the armored man Ben. Rainer Kaufmann disguises his mannerist love story between lies and betrayal as a weird crime thriller, with pullers and those who would like to be. A cinematic tightrope walk between raspy punches and stylized idling, which aims to amuse on a formal level by deliberately subverting the dramaturgy by repetitive dialogues and stylized film characters. A strangely cumbersome pleasure. "

- Iris Depping

“A young policewoman who works as an undercover agent is assigned to a safe cracker who has been released from custody. Gradually, her superior turns out to be a love-disappointed psychopath, driven by a thirst for revenge, who does not shrink from any horrific move in the game of intrigue, which is fueled by everyone involved.

Detective film that wants to continue the tradition of 'film noir' with the effective means of contemporary narrative cinema. [...] From 16. "

- Lexicon of International Films

The German Film and Media Evaluation FBW in Wiesbaden awarded the film the title valuable.

Statements from the director

From an interview with Margret Köhler
MK: You work very strongly with stylization.

"RK: [...] I'm interested in loneliness, being driven. I work with cinema forms, transporting them into the present with a certain irony. 'Long Hello and Short Goodbye' is a neo-romantic thriller that takes us on a journey into a world specially invented for the story. But it is also a bow to the film noir, because I love the morbid and the abysmal. Nevertheless it is not a quote film, but to be viewed detached from all these works. "

- Rainer Kaufmann


MK: Are you afraid of disturbing the audience?

“RK: As long as you don't lose the audience, you can easily irritate them. Friction and contradictions are good for a film. So you won't forget it so easily. I want to go further in the future, challenge even more. For me, the most beautiful films are both cheerful and unfathomable. That's how I feel about life. "

- Rainer Kaufmann

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ cit. n. Lothar R. Just (Ed.): Film-Jahrbuch 2000. Munich, 2000. P. 224 f.
  2. ↑ cit. n. Peter Hasenberg , Martin Thull (Ed.): Lexicon of International Films. Film year 1999. Reinbek near Hamburg, 2000. p. 222.
  3. ↑ cit. n. Lothar R. Just (Ed.): Film-Jahrbuch 2000. Munich, 2000. P. 224 f.

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