Waterland (film)

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Movie
German title Waterland
Original title Waterland
Country of production Great Britain
original language English
Publishing year 1992
length 95 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Stephen Gyllenhaal
script Peter Prince
production Katy McGuinness ,
Patrick Cassavetti
music Carter Burwell
camera Robert Elswit
cut Lesley Walker
occupation
synchronization

Waterland is a British film drama directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal from 1992. The novel of the same name (1983) by Graham Swift served as a literary model . In Germany the film was also released under the title The Secret of His Love .

action

Pittsburgh 1974: History teacher Tom Crick has lived in the United States with his wife Mary for 20 years. Because his students, above all the self-confident Matthew Price, are bored of his lessons and show little interest in the French Revolution , Tom decides to tell the students his own life story and thus bring them closer to European history.

Tom grew up in the so-called Fens on the English east coast. He lived with his father Henry and his mentally retarded brother Dick in a small cottage next to a weir that his father was responsible for. Tom was particularly influenced by his youth during World War II . At the age of 16 he was with Mary and a couple of boys at a river, where curious about the opposite sex, they wanted to strip naked in front of each other. After Tom and the other boys exposed themselves to Mary, Mary insisted that only those of them who could dive farthest into the river could see them naked. Tom emerged victorious at first, but his older brother Dick, who had fished for Aalen not far from them, wanted to try too. With an erection clearly visible to Mary under his underpants, he jumped into the river and beat his brother a long way, but refrained from seeing Mary naked. After falling in love, Tom and Mary took every opportunity to secretly sleep together. They did it in a train compartment and met regularly at an abandoned windmill. There Mary confessed that she felt sorry for Dick and that she wanted him to gain experience with women too.

Tom finally tells his students, who are amused that he tells them so openly about his first sexual experiences, about his grandfather, who owned a brewery. Tom travels back to 1911 with his students and lets them tour his grandfather's house. After the First World War , a home for traumatized soldiers was set up there, where Tom's mother finally met his father Henry. Back in the 1940s, Tom showed the now curious Matthew Price how Dick suddenly went out regularly in the evenings to meet a girl. Young Tom sensed that the girl was Mary. He jealously confronted Mary in front of the windmill. She confessed to him that she was pregnant but assured him that it was his child. She could not have had the sexual act with Dick because it was too big for her. Shortly afterwards, the body of Tom's friend Freddie Parr was swimming in front of his father's weir. Mary was immediately convinced that Dick had killed Freddie because she had been scared of Dick and, out of concern for Tom, had told him that she was pregnant with Freddie. When Tom, who initially didn't want to believe her, found evidence that Dick was actually Freddie's murderer, he confronted his brother in the cottage and told him that he was the child's father. Dick attacked Tom with a bottle, but left him alone and then took him to the attic. There he forced Tom to read him a letter stating that Dick had been conceived by his grandfather. Shaken and confused by his incestuous origins, Dick got drunk and committed suicide in the river.

When Tom comes home from class, he hears a baby crying. Mary, who has been suffering for years from not being able to have children and who is increasingly taking refuge in another world because of grief, has kidnapped the baby in a supermarket. Tom drives her and the baby to the supermarket, where the police have already started an investigation. Tom claims he found the baby with Mary before school and returns the baby to the mother. When Mary has a seizure back at her house, Tom blames herself for her suffering. She leaves him a week later and Tom is fired because the headmaster doesn't like his teaching methods. With Matthew, who now sees a fatherly role model in his teacher, Tom goes to a bar, where they play a game of billiards like father and son. Shortly afterwards, Tom is officially adopted in the school auditorium. When he stands in front of a microphone in front of the large number of students and tries to describe how it came about that he became a history teacher, he remembers how Mary had the child aborted by an old woman after Dick's suicide and because of the violent procedure couldn't have any more children. Determined to win Mary back for himself, Tom returns to his homeland, where, as suspected, he sees Mary walking in the Fens.

background

Filming took place on location in East Anglia , Kent , London and Pittsburgh as well as at London's Twickenham Film Studios. Many scenes were shot on Holbeach Marsh on the edge of The Wash and in Walsingham in Norfolk . Tom Crick's grandfather's brewery was filmed in Doddington Place near Faversham . Lindy Hemming was responsible for the costume design.

Waterland premiered in the UK on August 21, 1992 and screened at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 12, 1992 . The film was released in Germany on June 17, 1993 and was released on video on October 18, 1993.

Reviews

The lexicon of international films describes Waterland as a "staged and sometimes bumpy confrontation with the (dis) relationship between described and experienced history". “The inner struggle of a late self-discovery” is reflected “symbolically in predominantly literary symbols that find a cinematic equivalent in beguiling landscapes”.

Cinema compared Waterland to The Dead Poets Club (1989), in which Ethan Hawke had also starred. However, Gyllenhaal's film could not inspire "despite Jeremy Irons", which was primarily due to "the wild leaps in time and perspective". The film is "played well, but told in a confused way". Der Spiegel found that Gyllenhaal “had Americanized the material a little, but lovingly recreated the construction of the novel”.

Awards

Jeremy Irons received the 1994 Sant Jordi Award for Best Foreign Actor for his performances in Waterland , Verfassnis and M. Butterfly .

German version

The German dubbed version was made at Magma Synchron in Berlin. The dialogue book was written by Joachim Kunzendorf , who was also responsible for the dubbing.

role actor Voice actor
Tom Crick Jeremy Irons Frank Glaubrecht
Mary Crick Sinéad Cusack Gisela Fritsch
Matthew Price Ethan Hawke Matthias Hinze
young Tom Grant Warnock Florian Kiesel
young Mary Lena Headey Bianca Krahl
Lewis Scott John Heard Norbert Gescher
Freddie Parr Callum Dixon Björn Schalla
Peter Sean Maguire Tarek Helmy
Terry Ross McCall Albert Obitz
Dick Crick David Morrissey Timm Brückner
Henry Crick Pete Postlethwaite Klaus Sunshine

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Waterland. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed February 3, 2020 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  2. ↑ cf. cinema.de
  3. ↑ Finstere Familiensaga : In: Der Spiegel , 9/1993, March 1, 1993, p. 200.
  4. ^ Waterland. In: synchronkartei.de. German dubbing index , accessed on February 3, 2020 .