Fritz Lang, an expert in both melodramas and crime stories, summed it up in a famous film appearance: “In the script it's written, and on the screen it's pictures.” In the script it's writing, on the screen there are pictures. If you want, this describes the entire drama of “15 Years”, the film with which director Chris Kraus follows up his surprise success “Four Minutes”, a good seventeen years later. Three years ago, the script for “15 Years” won the Thomas Strittmatter Prize from the Baden-Württemberg Film Fund; The jury praised the “craftsmanship brilliance” of the script, which had a “high entertainment value” and at the same time an “enormous radicalism”. But now, in the cinema, they are images.
It's about Jenny, the heroine of “Four Minutes”, getting out of prison after fifteen years. She lives in a religious rehabilitation facility, “Team Jesus”. And she wants revenge on the man for whom she innocently served behind bars, the man who betrayed and forgotten her. When she meets a former classmate at the conservatory where she is cleaning, the opportunity arises.
Because Jenny, we remember, is a brilliant pianist, and Mangold, her classmate, now an artistic agent, brings her together with a musician from Syria, whom she is supposed to accompany on the piano. Omar lost an arm in the civil war in Aleppo, and Jenny's treacherous ex-lover, who made a career on television under the name Gimmiemore, now hosts a casting show in which artists with physical disabilities appear. The Syrian-German duo is selected, moves on to the next round, and one day Jenny stands in Gimmiemore's luxury villa in the countryside with a knife in her hand.
That's the story. She is radical in that she does not subject her ideas to probability testing, as in the illustration of Jenny's violent outbursts, which culminate in her beating up a police officer for shooting an escaped circus lion. And it is conventional in a very German way because it illustrates everything that is not on the tree at the count of three. Not only do we learn that Omar's arm was chopped off by terrorists, we see it too. We listen to every song that the singer Max Prosa composed for “15 Years” until the bitter end, and we endure the show in which Jenny and Omar appear in a sequence of scenes that is embarrassingly well-intentioned and fails in its task. to parody German television where it is most embarrassing.
Hannah Herzsprung, whose career began with “Four Minutes,” rows through this narrative junk room like a swimmer between rapids, but even her overwhelming presence can’t prevent the film from running out of steam long ago when Jenny and Gimmiemore (Albrecht Schuch) break up finally face alone. What then follows, a murder, a suicide, a death from cancer, a wedding, a bar scene, would have been enough as a final twist for several scripts. For a film like “15 Years” it’s still not enough. So much for brilliance.
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