DThe last lockdown was three years ago. But the cinema is not finished with Corona yet. In “Hors du temps” the Frenchman Olivier Assayas sends four actors to the place of his childhood, a country house in a village near Paris. They embody an autobiographical quartet: the director, his brother and their partners. It is the first spring of the pandemic, the time of curfews, closed borders, face masks and disinfectant sprays. And Paul and Étienne, the brothers, get on each other's nerves, even though they live in a paradise, a setting like Monet and Sisley. Some people want the pointer to jump back to normal, they stuff themselves with crepes and red wine and fear the standstill more than the virus. The other, Assayas' alter ego, obsessively washes his hands, orders his socks from Amazon and has Zoom conversations with his psychotherapist at a tree root on which he places his smartphone.
“Hors du temps” is a restless idyll that is highly recognizable, at least for those Western Europeans who did not have to look after their children at home during the lockdown and fear for their jobs. And it is a very French form of self-therapy: the dead, the overcrowded clinics, the helpless politicians, the police checks, all of this only appears in passing in this chamber play. If Assayas intended to turn the pandemic into a country trip, he succeeded. But we still know too well what it really was like to believe his beautiful pictures.
The coldness towards all people
Matthias Glasner's “Die,” one of two German entries in the Berlinale competition, is also an autobiographical work. But you only notice it in the end credits, where Glasner dedicates the film to his family, his parents, siblings and friends. They all appear in this story, transformed into fictions, without that playing any role. Because in many scenes “dying” is very close to German reality.
At the beginning we see an old woman crouching on the ground who has changed into her nightdress and is desperately trying to call her son in distant Berlin, while she rejects her neighbor's offer of help. Then the woman and her husband, who suffers from dementia, drive the car to go shopping in Winsen/Luhe; He no longer has a driver's license, she is almost blind, but together they somehow make it home. Later, after her husband's death, the woman sits at the table with her son and tells him how she threw him to the floor as a baby because she couldn't stand his screaming anymore. She says she never really liked him, and he replies that he felt the same way. Now he knows from whom he gets his coldness towards himself and all other people.
A coldness that is alien to Glasner's film. He is passionate about each of his characters, even when they experience completely unlikely things like Ellen, who wakes up in a hotel room in Latvia without knowing how she got there and somehow finds her way back to Hamburg, where she works in a dentist's office falls in love with a married temporary doctor. Meanwhile, Ellen's brother Tom, a conductor, is in Berlin helping an ex-girlfriend give birth to her child, whose father is failing in the role of father. He now has “an eighth of a baby,” says Tom to his assistant, with whom he sleeps.
#Die #love #Hilde #Berlinale