“Marriage is an institution incompatible with a woman who works, thinks and acts freely.” The phrase of the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973), put into the mouth of the fabulous performer Vicky Krieps by the veteran German director Margarethe Von Trotta already in the final part of the film, resonates with the forcefulness of the bells of a cathedral . And yet, when she makes such an assertion, it is also the time to analyze the writer's vital contradictions, exposed throughout history, and driven by a society that crushed independent spirits like Bachmann's. The discordances of one of the most prominent voices in 20th century German literature, capable of promoting an openly feminist public message while she could not help but allow herself to be psychologically tortured by a cruel, vain lover with a pristine facade: the Swiss playwright Max Frisch .
Journey to the desert, biopic of a part of his existence, that of the love relationship with Frisch, between 1958 and 1963, and his subsequent vital escape to a Middle Eastern country that never materialized with the Viennese journalist Adolf Opel, is a film that is perhaps a bit old in its staging, but also very interesting, both socially and literary. A complex, arid and rocky work, perhaps even leaden, that does not dare to be as abstract and ghostly as it could have been had it followed the style indicated in its first sequences, and not the academicism that is later displayed. But it also clearly shows the insecurities of the most prestigious creators. Those who, with an elegant appearance and haughty bearing, can hide inner monsters that suck the blood of those around them in order to enhance their lame creativity. And also those who, while they carry the hope of the emergence of a new society that is more fair to women, inspires a multitude of followers, and creators of a new linguistic universe outside the domain of men, in their private core cannot avoid being overwhelmed by their aggressors, burdened by centuries of oppression around love, work, sex and the place they have in society, culture and art.
As occurred in the recent Anatomy of a fall, the ego of the artist and the inability to create beyond the dumping of experiences of what is in front of you, in the case of Frisch, faces the continuous search for an own and open meaning in the work of the also linguist, thinker and philosopher Bachmann. “Every writer lives from language, and not from writing about what surrounds him,” the poet snaps at her lover, jealous in love and professional matters, in one of her intellectual brawls.
And Von Trotta, 81 years old, with five decades of praiseworthy work under his belt and cinematographic biographies as relevant as Rosa Luxemburg (1986) and Hannah Arendt (2012), shows these attempts at emancipation with a narrative structure of jumps in space and time – not only between the desert and Central Europe, but also with the respite that Rome represents for the writer -, which is not always They dramatically feed each other in the best way, but they serve to show the vital wandering of a woman in search of her own self, who “works, thinks and acts freely.” Or that she at least intends it with all her might.
Journey to the desert
Address: Margarethe Von Trotta.
Performers: Vicky Krieps, Ronald Zehrfeld, Tobias Samuel Resch, Luna Wedler.
Gender: drama. Germany, 2023.
Duration: 110 minutes.
Premiere: January 19.
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