Night train to Lisbon (film)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Night Train to Lisbon |
| Original title | Night Train to Lisbon |
| Country of production | Germany , Switzerland , Portugal |
| original language | English , German |
| Publishing year | 2013 |
| length | 110 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Bille August |
| script |
Greg Latter , Ulrich Herrmann |
| production |
Kerstin Ramcke , Peter Reichenbach , Gunther Russ |
| music | Annette Focks |
| camera | Filip Zumbrunn |
| cut | Hansjörg Weißbrich |
| occupation | |
| |
Night Train to Lisbon (Original title: Night Train to Lisbon) is a film by Bille August from the year 2013 . The film, based on the novel of the same name by Pascal Mercier, premiered on February 13, 2013 at the 63rd Berlinale , where it was shown outside of the competition. The cinema release in Germany was on March 7, 2013.
action
Raimund Gregorius is an aging grammar school teacher for ancient languages in Bern , who - divorced for over five years - lives alone in a dark apartment full of books, suffers from insomnia and plays chess with himself every morning before breakfast. On a rainy morning, on his way to school, he saves a young Portuguese woman who is about to jump into the water from the Kirchenfeld Bridge. At her request, he takes the completely soaked woman to his Latin class to warm up. However, she soon leaves the classroom. In her red coat, which she leaves behind, Gregorius finds a book by the Portuguese author Amadeu de Prado. When leafing through, a train ticket to Lisbon falls out, departure in 15 minutes. Gregorius hurries to the train station, but cannot see the strange girl anywhere. Confused by the encounter and fascinated by the promisingly poetic title of the book, Um ourives das palavras (A goldsmith of words), Gregorius decided to get on the departing train, to use the ticket for himself and so spontaneously break out of his decades-long everyday routine to go in search of traces of the book author in Lisbon.
At Amadeu de Prado's old address, he finds his careworn sister Adriana, who idolizes her brother and acts as if her brother were still alive, although her servant Clotilde Gregorius secretly reveals that Amadeu has died for over 30 years and is in Lisbon is buried. It is also she who tells the guest how Amadeu once saved his sister's life as a medical student by cutting a tracheotomy when she had choked while eating and was threatened with suffocation. Clotilde also explains to him that on the day of the revolution against the Salazar dictatorship, Amadeu died of an aneurysm that he knew about but kept from others.
When Gregorius collides with a cyclist on the way from the cemetery and breaks his old horn-rimmed glasses, the ophthalmologist Mariana prescribes a new, more modern model that suddenly makes his vision much easier. Mariana befriends Gregorius. To help him with his research, she advises him to visit her old uncle João, who had contact with Amadeu de Prado as a resistance fighter and now lives in a nursing home. During the Portuguese dictatorship, he, who loved to play Mozart as a pianist, was smashed both hands by the secret service officer Mendes, who was notorious as the butcher of Lisbon for his brutal methods of torture and killing. Before that, it was his friend Amadeu, of all people, who, as a doctor, saved the life of this hated human torturer with a heart injection and therefore turned from a Samaritan into a political traitor in the eyes of the oppressed population.
With Adriana's and João's help, Gregorius found Father Bartolomeu, Amadeu's former teacher, who enthusiastically told him about the outstanding intellectual abilities of his truth-loving model student, but also his rebellious and blasphemous high school speech denouncing the hypocrisy of school, church and state bitter memory has remained.
Gregorius meets other important people who knew Amadeu and thus delves deeper and deeper into a dramatic love triangle that takes place during the dictatorship terror and is told in several flashbacks. At that time, Amadeu, together with his old schoolmate Jorge and his lover Estefânia, defended themselves against the regime until Amadeu and Estefânia got closer and fell in love. More out of jealousy than political calculation, Jorge demanded the death of Estefânia, who was particularly stubbornly sought by the secret police because of her phenomenal memory, which had saved the data of all resistance fighters - for Amadeu an unacceptable request, in which the "inseparable" male friendship between aristocrats - and the greengrocer's son finally broke. Instead of having Estefânia shot by Jorge, he took her out of the country to Spain in a night and fog operation - an escape that only succeeded because the secret service chief Mendes, who had felt obliged to Amadeu since saving his life, had instructed his border guards accordingly. On the Spanish Atlantic coast, Amadeu dreamed of a life together with Estefânia on the Amazon , an idea that she was afraid of not being able to live up to. That is why she had Amadeu take her to Salamanca and separated from him there.
Eventually Gregorius learns that the young woman who wanted to jump off the bridge in Bern is Catarina Mendes, the granddaughter of that "butcher of Lisbon". He gives her back her red coat; however, she refuses to take back the book A Goldsmith of Words . Then he drives to Salamanca with the ophthalmologist Mariana Gregorius, where he meets Estefânia, who is still mourning Amadeu and feels responsible for his death. He gives her the book.
When Gregorius has finished his research in Lisbon and wants to return to Bern to resume his old life, the ophthalmologist Mariana accompanies him to the train station. She tries to persuade him to stay in Lisbon - and her compliment that she finds him “not boring at all” (in contrast to his ex-wife, who divorced him because of it) sounds like a declaration of love. Totally surprised by this sudden turn, Gregorius hesitates to get on the train - open end.
reception
Audience numbers
Nationwide, 745,391 moviegoers were counted at the box office in 2013, making it 46th in the list of the most-visited films of the year. In Switzerland, the film attracted a total of 159,546 (of which 7095 in the Romandie on) viewers.
Reviews
For him as a writer, the reception of the film is "sometimes not easy to endure" and "exhausting", says Peter Bieri . “Some of the dialogues are terribly banal”.
“That a Latin teacher from Bern […] comes across a story in which thirty years ago blood and tears were shed, hearts were broken, bones were shattered; that the beauty of the city of Lisbon echoes in a strange way with the bitterness of the memories nestling in its walls: all of this is equally important or unimportant to August, and so his film is like a journey in a closed compartment, on which one sees the most wonderful landscapes. But all only behind glass. "
“Big, well-lit Cinemascope images everywhere, big names in the smallest parts, piano music whenever it's romantic, violins when it's dramatic, and trumpets when it's sad. And yet: Both stories leave you strangely untouched, the framework because only what has been told is told here, the flashback because it only illustrates what is said. Both storylines take the power away from each other. "
"An uninspired, almost obdurate bestseller adaptation that degenerates into a series of retrospectives on a love in times of revolution without association."
“But it is not so easy to bring the conversation and memory novel to life. The narrative tone of the Swiss Mercier is too melancholy, too sedate and deliberate. The fact that 'Night Train to Lisbon' was still a success as a literary film is not least due to the top-class actors [...]. The plot jumps into the past with each new encounter - this is not particularly original, but corresponds exactly to the structure of the novel. You don't have to share the euphoria of Pascal Mercier, for whom Bille August's adaptation was 'an experience of hypnotic power'. But whoever liked the book will also love the film. "
“Despite this reduction of the novel to the most important plot points, the night train to Lisbon wasn't even entertaining. On the one hand, this is due to the loveless TV aesthetic and unmotivated staging, and on the other hand, with a few exceptions, the actors' unmotivated play. Bruno Ganz and August Diehl are the only ones who provide more intense moments, the rest of the cast is limited to saying important sentences into the camera with a meaningful look. "
The German Film and Media Assessment FBW in Wiesbaden awarded the film the rating “particularly valuable”.
See also
Web links
- Night Train to Lisbon in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Night Train to Lisbon
- German cinema trailer on YouTube
Individual evidence
- ^ Certificate of release for night train to Lisbon . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , January 2013 (PDF; test number: 136 986 K).
- ↑ Berlinale 2013: Competition complete . In: berlinale . Archived from the original on January 24, 2013. Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved March 12, 2013.
- ↑ KINOaktuell: What you wanted: Münster's cinema year 2013, C. Lou Lloyd, Filminfo No. 4, 23. – 29. January 2014, p. 24f
- ↑ Steffen Hung: Night Train To Lisbon - hitparade.ch. In: www.hitparade.ch. Retrieved October 18, 2016 .
- ↑ Podcast ( Memento from December 3, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (from 36 min)
- ^ Andreas Kilb, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of February 14, 2013
- ↑ Peter Zander, Die Welt, March 7, 2013
- ↑ Night train to Lisbon. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
- ^ Critic.de
