The title character in the new film by Jan-Ole Gerster is an obnoxious woman. It's Lara Jenkins's 60th birthday, she's out and about in Berlin, drawing a trail of devastation through the city and the relationships she's had, as she's apparently been through her life. Or maybe the icing. Compassion, closeness, warmth: none of this woman radiates, Corinna Harfouch plays this almost without emotion, more than a twitch of the mouth is barely in it. If she has a heart, one may assume: It is made of stone, and it does not twitch.
photo gallery
7 pictures
"Lara": No reason to indulgeThe day Gerster accompanies her starts with Lara's decision to jump out of the window. The chair is already on the sill, it rings at the door. Police officers are, they need her as a witness to a search of the apartment in the anonymous house where she lives. She was also a civil servant. Lara lets herself be talked into, follows the two as if it were her duty - but apparently also lacks the final determination to jump.
Lara was not with the police; We'll find out later, when she revisits her job in the city administration. Glaciation here too: she was feared as a boss. The fact that she now, after the farewell, a former colleague offers you, does not please them, but disturbs them.
"Lara" is an episodic film, at first sight very similar to "Oh Boy", the debut with which director Jan-Ole Gerster made a name for himself. So he let a young man without a right goal spin through the Prenzlauer Berg, took many stereotypes of the present and dipped them in a black and white, whose finishing varnish took the event the last lightness.
The screenplay for "Lara" has not written Gerster, whose author is the Slovene Blaz Kutin, a rather blank slate. But you can immediately see what irritated Gerster to this story: a dramaturgy that focuses more on encounters than on a plot context.
"Lara"
Germany 2019
Director: Jan-Ole Gerster
Screenplay: Blaz Kutin
Performers: Corinna Harfouch, Tom Schilling, Andre Jung, Volkmar Kleinert, Rainer Bock, Edin Hasanovic, Mala Emde
Production: Zhivago film
Rental: StudioCanal Germany
Length: 98 minutes
FSK: no age restriction
Start: 7th November 2019
Even more than in "Oh Boy" is the incidental nature of the incident in "Lara" but only sham. The casual is by no means casual, but bit by bit a puzzle is put together, in which less interested in the puzzle piece than the whole. Nothing stands for itself. Everything is centered on the protagonist. Whatever happens, the screenplay is done for Lara's sake: one should understand what made her what she is.
There are encounters of all kinds, with the colleagues, with the mother and above all with the man who, it seems to her and possibly the film, has destroyed her life. In the end, the explanation that comes down to everything is almost funny in its psychological flatness.
Whereby it is never clear how serious it all meant - not too much, one hopes, but even then the sound would have slipped strangely in many scenes. A neighbor (André Jung), who adores Lara in the most touching manner, is portrayed by the film rather as a sad figure, almost denounced. And then only Victor, the son whom Tom Schilling gives as the almost laughable cliché of the sentimental artist.
He is a pianist whose ambition extends beyond playing. He has composed a concerto for piano and orchestra, which has its premiere just on the birthday of the mother. She buys all the remaining tickets for the concert, and her attempt to get them out is the thread along which the episodes of the movie are lined up. In the afternoon before the concert comes, against the will of the son, still to an encounter. In doing so, the mother gives a verdict on the composition of her son, which confirms this in his deepest self-doubt.
In the video: The trailer for "Lara"
StudioCanal
On the one hand, that is, from the end, clearly legible: She wants to do to him what has been done to her. And such blanks are teeming in the movie. On the other hand, the main character remains as one-dimensional as Corinna Harfouch consequently also plays it.
It will not be a tragedy like that. It does not want to go out on comedy any more. And somewhere in between, the whole movie is left behind.