Movie of the week: »Licorice Pizza«, »Monobloc«, »Photocopier«, »The Impossible Project«

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Chair user in »Monobloc«: very important, at the same time »polarizing«

Photo: © Salzgeber

»monobloc«

The documentary film »Monobloc« deals with a monumental banality - and he treats his subject with quite appropriate means. The Monobloc plastic chair, which is extremely ugly by popular standards of beauty, is said to be the best-selling piece of furniture of all time and probably on every continent. The German documentary filmmaker Hauke ​​Wendler followed him, fortunately without pathetically exalting the chair into a symbol. He shows the chair in front of bars in the Third World, on the North Sea beach and in luxury gardens in the foothills of the Alps. Dismantled into individual parts as plastic scrap and as a valuable core of cheap wheelchairs for the poor of Africa.

Wendler visits chair manufacturers and chair users in Italy, Uganda and India, in the USA and in Brazil.

The thing is "unsightly," "cold," "uncomfortable," commonplace Germans tell him into the camera, which he has of course seated in monobloc chairs for interviews.

The thing is "a must in India," Indian plastic chair makers tell him, and that he has made the felling of millions of trees superfluous.

In the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, the piece of furniture is considered very important, at the same time »polarizing« and proof that »price plays a role« when it comes to design issues.

The charm of Wendler's film is that it takes its viewers on a doubting and curious search. The Frenchman Henry Massonnet received an award for the Monobloc plastic chair in 1974, but did not register a patent for it. This is one of the reasons why the seating thing is spread across the globe in an incredible number of versions, some of which can even be recycled. Maybe it's not important to decide whether the monobloc is primarily an aesthetic impertinence or an ingenious cheap part that enables mankind to finally get its butt off the ground. The film »Monobloc« teaches its audience that the world will definitely not be able to do without the plastic chair for many years to come. In cinemas from January 27th.

»Monobloc«, Germany 2021. Direction and script: Hauke ​​Wendler.

95 minutes.

»Licorice Pizza«

Once upon a time in America's golden seventies - that could be the secret motto of this fairytale beautiful comedy.

Paul Thomas Anderson's film takes place in a time when waterbeds were fashionable and record shops were christened Licorice Pizza.

Gary (Cooper Hoffman) is 15 years old, lives in California's San Fernando Valley and appears as a child actor in Hollywood films while attending school;

Alana (Alana Haim) is ten years older and earns some money with a job as a photo assistant on the school campus.

The precocious, a bit fat-cheeked little one is allowed to take the adventurous Alana out for a walk, but of course he gets rebuffed at first.

Nevertheless, a ludicrously curvaceous, airy love story begins, which bears witness to a poetry that hasn't been seen in the cinema for a very long time.

Just as writer Marcel Proust brings bygone pleasures to life by evoking the smell of a sweet pastry, filmmaker Anderson in Licorice Pizza does it with hot dogs, the David Bowie song Life on Mars? and patterned collared shirts.

The atmosphere of a bygone, apparently blissful youth is conjured up here with an insane enthusiasm for detail.

In the first few minutes, this film involuntarily awakens the desire in cinema viewers, if they have a heart, to have been there in that magical Californian suburban world in which the heroic couple meet. Musician hitherto known, Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman, son of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, perform with a light-hearted, superbly casual intensity, making the film a heartwarming delight; Bradley Cooper stars in the supporting role of a wacky Hollywood celebrity. Great entertainment cinema is often a matter of a loving gaze. Most likely, we and our grandchildren will still watch Licorice Pizza every year at Christmas time, when Notting Hill is long forgotten. In cinemas from January 27th.

»Licorice Pizza«, USA 2021. Director and screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson.

Starring: Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, Bradley Cooper, Sean Penn, Tom Waits.

123 minutes.

Here you can read a portrait of director Paul Thomas Anderson.

»photocopier«

Some films hit a nerve and trigger social debates.

That was obviously the case with this film from Indonesia: At the Citra Awards, the Indonesian Oscars, »Photocopier« won in twelve categories last year, including best film.

And director Wregas Bhanuteja was awarded best director for his feature film debut.

With »Photocopier«, Bhanuteja attacks encrusted structures, class differences and double standards head-on. He rides his attack in the form of a smart tech thriller that primarily appeals to a young audience. The story revolves around the student Sur, who comes from a conservative Muslim family and struggles to make ends meet with a fast food restaurant. The study is made possible by a scholarship. When photos of her drunk at a party appear online, the responsible body recognizes her support.

Sur can't remember what happened at the party.

When her family kicks her out, Sur sets off in search of the truth.

With an outrageous action, she denounces the pressure that weighs on young women in Asian societies and the injustice with which a privileged upper class exploits the weak at the same time.

Only last year, an Indonesian won the main prize at the Locarno film festival, director Edwin, and now Bhanuteja is showing that the island state has even more to offer.

»Photocopier« seems a little too theatrical at times, but the urgency of the staging is always palpable.

In many scenes, smoke wafts through the neighborhoods of working-class families as the government smokes them out to fight dengue fever.

The images thus acquire a psychedelic quality that can also be understood as a metaphor for social conditions.

On Netflix since January 13.

»Photocopier«, Indonesia 2021. Director: Wregas Bhanuteja.

Book: Henricus Pria, Wregas Bhanuteja.

Starring: Shenina Syawalita, Cinnamon, Lutesha, Chicco Kurniawan.

130 minutes.

»The Impossible Project«

Probably never before have so many pictures been taken and shared as since the introduction of the smartphone.

Analogue photography seems to be more and more lost, great art is threatened by digital sell-out.

Jens Meurer's documentary »The Impossible Project« is about the Viennese dreamer, entrepreneur and spider researcher Florian Kaps, who took over a Polaroid factory in the Dutch town of Enschede at the end of the noughties.

It is the portrait of a man and the chronicle of his struggle. His goal: to defend and preserve everything that smells, tastes and can be touched, even if it seems outdated in the digital age. Vinyl records, telephones or even Polaroids. But how does that work, how do you earn money if you look at the world with a supposedly wistful, nostalgic look? Meurer's film accompanies Kaps, who turns out to be a sometimes annoying and yet admirable tumbler, over a number of years.

Perhaps the film would have benefited from a little more distance from its hero and his numerous ventures.

But thanks to some great camerawork that explores the ancient gadgets and a sound that makes the sounds of them a sensual experience, he lets viewers feel the sexyness of this physical world to which we ultimately belong , even if we are spending more and more of our lives in the digital world.

In cinemas since January 20th.

»The Impossible Project«, Germany/Austria 2020. Director: Jens Meurer.

Book: Franziska Kramer, Jens Meurer, camera: Bernd Fischer, Thorsen Lippstock.

With Anna Kaps, Florian Kaps, Oskar Smolokowski.

99 minutes.