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Olivia Wilde in Don't Worry Darling
Photo: Warner Bros./AP
In cinemas from September 22:
"Don't Worry Darling"
Actress and director Olivia Wilde has been hailed as a comedic talent since the 2029 film »Booksmart«; her new work is constructed as a psychological thriller.
Jack and Alice (played by pop star Harry Styles, the director's partner, and Florence Pugh) live a picture-perfect 1950s life in a brightly colored condominium complex somewhere in the USA.
The neighbors are fresh and dapper like her.
The men scoot to work in the limousine.
The women clean, cook and shop during the day, and in the evening they fervently invite their returning husbands to mate.
»Victory« is the name of the settlement project in Wilde's film, which takes its inspiration from films like »The Matrix« and »The Truman Show«.
The heroine Alice has strange memory flashes, is tormented by panic attacks, sees a neighbor freaking out - and begins to suspect that her handsome, dancing husband is manipulating her badly.
»Don't Worry Darling« entertainingly shows the pitfalls of a model of women's oppression devised by reactionary men and delights in the attractiveness of its fellow players.
However, the heroine's fight for liberation is never really exciting.
Even if the last dumbfounded in the audience should have long since understood that practically everything is rotten in the fifties idyll, the heroine still turns more revealing rounds and looks extensively frightened.
After all, the film has already become a bit famous in the world of gossip before it hits the cinemas: actress Pugh and director Wilde allegedly quarreled during filming, in the trailer for the film Pugh found himself portrayed too clearly as a sex object - and also she had taken offense at the allegedly unequal payment of leading actress and leading actor.
However, Wilde now publicly denies that Styles received a much higher fee than Pugh.
She sees herself as a fighter for women's rights.
In fact, her film leaves no doubt as to its feminist message.
Wolfgang Hoebel
"Don't Worry Darling".
USA 2022. Director: Olivia Wilde.
Book: Katie Silberman.
With Florence Pugh, Harry Styles, Olivia Wilde.
123 minutes.
Read our report from the premiere in Venice here
»Peter von Kant«
In February, the French star director François Ozon opened the Berlinale with his homage to the German cinema berserker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a game of deception that puzzles itself and cinema history, with which Ozon exposes his declared idol as a manipulative diva and in need of love, a drunken wretch , but at the same time pays tender homage to him.
His trick is to cast the three female protagonists of the exactly 50-year-old Fassbinder original »The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant« with men – and to elevate the scenery from the world of fashion to the world of film.
Leading actor Denis Ménochet, massive and nervous, with blazing desire in his eyes, plays the role of the German film director Peter von Kant in Cologne, which is beautifully painted on the set in the early 1970s.
It is probably the director's real romance with the actor Günter Kaufmann that Ozon interprets here - following the widespread assumption that Fassbinder himself had projected his own male relationship box onto female characters in »Petra von Kant«.
Ozone doesn't seem to care about current cinema issues, sexism, abuse of power or misogyny.
His juicy, meticulous, at times amusing remix remains a respectful dialogue between film authors,
decked out in luscious images and crazy props.
For Fassbinder Ultras.
Andrew Borcholte
»Peter von Kant«: France/ Belgium 2022. Director and script: François Ozon.
With Denis Ménochet, Isabelle Adjani, Hanna Schygulla, Stefan Crepon, Khalil Ben Gharbia.
»lunch hour«
Lars Jessen's film tells of fat tractors, ugly dining rooms, wry-mouthed neighbors scolding each other and the charm of northern German country life in general.
The always wonderfully crumpled Charly Hübner plays a city dweller who moves back to his home village, a town called Brikebüll, for a few months, maybe even a year.
There he wants to look after the two old people who once raised him - how exactly the two old men (played by Hildegard Schmahl and Peter Franke) are related to him is left in the dark for a long time in the film adaptation of Dörte Hansen's bestseller book, probably to arouse the curiosity of the viewers.
In his interpretation of »Midday Hour«, director Jessen shows the beauty and brokenness of a harsh rural world in which the tree in the center of the village is cut down out of greed and a belief in progress.
And he quite rightly relies on the artistry of his lead actor.
Insistently and casually, Hübner plays a hero who is exhausted by complicated love affairs and boasts a cool sense of humour.
Unfortunately, tearful pop songs occasionally roar through this otherwise pleasantly dry village comedy, which smartly breathes new life into the genre of German Heimatfilm.
Wolfgang Hoebel
"Lunchtime".
Germany 2022. Director: Lars Jessen.
Book: Dorte Hansen, Catherine Junk.
With Charly Hübner, Hildegard Schmahl, Peter Franke.
93 minutes.
streaming
»A Night of Knowing Nothing« (by Mubi)
Is it only possible to judge in retrospect whether an event was historical?
In any case, the time interval makes the judgment appear more serious, more clarified and more prudent.
It is therefore an extremely clever trick that Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia employs in her outstanding debut film, A Night of Knowing Nothing, a documentary essay.
She tells of the attack on Nehru University in New Delhi, in which thugs indiscriminately beat up students without the police intervening.
That's two years ago.
However, Kapadia dipped and edited the cell phone recordings and social media snippets of the attack into black and white so that they look like pictures from decades ago.
The historical perspective in which she places the attack is impressive: the fascist regimes in Italy and Germany once cemented their power with similar outbursts of violence intended to intimidate.
There could hardly be a more impressive commentary on the state of Indian democracy under the authoritarian leadership of Narendra Modi than »A Night of Knowing Nothing«.
At the same time, Kapadia interweaves the news images with fragments of a fictionalized love story, which she also reports as if from a distant memory.
The comparison with Chris Marker's masterpiece "Sans soleil" is obvious and not a bit far-fetched.
Kapadia is currently working on her feature film debut.
You can already look forward to it.
Hannah Pilarczyk
»A Night of Knowing Nothing« India 2021. Written and directed by Payal Kapadia.
99 minutes
»Annie Ernaux' Super 8 Diaries« (in the Arte media library)
With Annie Ernaux, the flow of time is always a little different.
She first made her international breakthrough as a writer at the age of 70 with books such as the memoir »The Years« (originally »Les années«), and now at the age of 82 she is also conquering the cinema.
In 2021, the film adaptation of her autofiction work »The Event« by Audrey Diwan won the Golden Lion in Venice.
In May 2022 she presented her first directorial work in Cannes: »Les années Super-8«.
It is a collage made with her son David Ernaux-Briot of the Super 8 films that the Ernaux family made between 1972 and 1981.
The one-hour film is now available in the Arte media library in the French original with Ernaux as narrator and in the German version (called »Annie Ernaux' Super 8-Diaries«) with Eva Matthes.
Ernaux's late husband and father of their two sons was always behind the camera when filming vacations and family celebrations - a strict division of tasks according to gender, as Ernaux comments.
The marriage of the two seems to be shaped by such constraints.
As you already know from »The Years«, the connection was not a happy one.
It is unclear whether one would have understood it from the pictures.
Most of them are too vague and banal to stand up to Ernaux's trenchant commentary.
How Ernaux writes her own story through persistent self-questioning remains impressive in the film version as well.
Hannah Pilarczyk
»Les années Super-8« France 2022. Written and directed by Annie Ernaux, David Ernaux-Briot.
60 minutes