A million minutes of boredom with Tom Schilling and Karoline Herfurth

2024-02-01 15:49:05

When Germans experience happiness, does it necessarily have to look like a Telekom advertisement? Can truths that make you change your life be as shallow as the water on the beach in Phuket? And when will the two of them finally buy the stupid motorhome?

Such questions accompany the viewer for as long as the title of the new film with Tom Schilling and Karoline Herfurth suggests – “A million minutes”, at least it feels like it, because the thing drags on. The journey goes from Berlin-Mitte via Thailand to Iceland. In between we dive in the shark cage. But there are no sharks to be seen. You probably disdain Schmonzetten.

This is what we are dealing with. One should have been warned: by the bestseller of the same name by Wolf Küper, which was published a few years ago and whose subtitle was: “How I fulfilled my daughter’s wish and we found happiness”. That sounds like a fairy tale, and not a particularly good one. In good fairy tales, the bad wolf or the wicked witch comes at some point. Here there is only an annoyed boss and an angry dad. Women cry quietly from car windows. Hearty Icelanders grin broadly and fry fish. In the best scene, a fire truck arrives. But everything burned down long ago.

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The story goes like this: A stressed-out UN employee who is working hard for the climate, but has the worst CO₂ balance in all of Berlin-Mitte because of his air miles, is arguing with his wife. She neglects her career as an environmental engineer (she herself is built close to the water) to look after their children. He does what he can and shows his feelings as much as he can, but usually just sits sadly on the S-Bahn at five in the morning so that he can make it to New York in time for the summit, where, like a very modern man, he nods encouragingly to his boss. She is no joke and a tough cookie and grants his request to let him work in the mobile office for a while with furious anger.

The father decided to do this after a visit to the doctor. His daughter is developing backwards. The only thing you can do there is spend time together. And didn’t the daughter herself just want “a million minutes” of quality time with the family? The man has a calculator. A million minutes is almost two years. The globe is then quickly turned and the daughter is allowed to type with her finger. North Korea! Uh, I’d rather not.

The following attempts, Thailand and Iceland, are more acceptable. So that’s where it should go. There the family will find happiness, in shorts or a thick sweater, drinking beer in humid markets, wrapping children’s bicycles with light chains, building a veranda and hanging out loads of laundry.

The film follows a similar principle to rotating the globe. Anything that doesn’t fit into his predetermined moral pattern is quietly ignored. The biggest conflicts arise when the internet goes down or the sturdy Icelandic man leans a little too deeply into architect’s plans with his wife. But don’t worry, nothing more than chaste kisses are exchanged here, and even then only between married couples.

Chaste kisses between married couples: scene from “A Million Minutes”

Quelle: Warner Brothers

At some point the reformed ex-workaholic shows up after the sharks and then with the motorhome in question. This saves the small Biedermeier world in the midst of predatory capitalism. The woman finds fulfillment in renovating dilapidated huts in the Icelandic pampas. And the man hanging out the laundry or – of course there is no mention of this in the film – writing the very book on which the film is based.

And there you see what, if you wanted to be tough, you would have to call mendacity. Because the economic viability of the courageous venture to leave the country is only mentioned in passing. Somehow it’s enough, even if your full-time job is to insulate a single puny barn.

This is where a self-help, feel-good bestseller comes in handy in the form of an “autobiographical novel” that puts all sorts of like-minded people with luxury problems in a good mood and in which only cynical natures recognize the underlying pyramid scheme: a single dropout can survive by overcoming the dropout praises the green clover, the continued loafing around on beaches and among distinguished locals. Thank the royalties. The best thing to do is to sell the film rights.

Everyone else has to do what the film secretly suggests: play for time. Somewhere in West Germany there’s probably a well-off boomer dad whose patriarchal career obsession will soon result in a chic single-family home. The self-discovery of the sensitive Millennial children in the midlife crisis ultimately has to be paid for. What is a package holiday to the Maldives compared to a trip to the inner center? The dialogues sound like this: “It’s not about a fucking Au pair – it’s about us, as a family.”

“Thailand – the best travel tips”

So the book is bad. The direction only makes it marginally better. Karoline Herfurth, who plays the woman, hired her husband, the producer Christopher Doll, for this. In an interview she is quoted as follows: “I have long wanted to see a story through his eyes and follow his vision as a director.” Also a kind of emigration.

But Doll and his cameraman Andreas Berger can travel to Bangkok and Reykjavík as often as they want. They only come home with pictures that they could have taken in Wanne-Eickel. Apparently the trip was worth it just for a few picturesque sunsets, which are occasionally cropped up like in a holiday home video à la “Thailand – the best travel tips” uploaded to YouTube by over-ambitious amateur filmmakers.

At the latest, when in a time-lapse montage Tom Schilling as the father splashes around in the water with Pola Friedrichs as the daughter Nina, practices an obstacle course called a “Ninathon” or sits at the laptop in swimming shorts, you are surprised that there is not the logo of Signal Iduna, Vodafone or the TUI is displayed. You can feel how each shot wants to assert an emotional ocean, but like the story they illustrate, the images ripple away.

The actors do their job well, Schilling in particular saves what little there is to be saved here. The film remains strangely undecided as to whether it should tell about the dropout or about the child’s alleged developmental disorder – the girl actually only stands out because of her blooming imagination, which allows her to answer the psychologist’s question about what is falling wet from the sky: a wet dog, which later becomes virtually true when the family encounters a flying fox on a Thai suspension bridge. This is probably what it means: the child’s supposed illness is actually a gift from God that shows the way out of the devilish trap of modern civilization, consisting of money, WiFi and underfloor heating.

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Even if it is true in individual cases and the Küper family has become really happy – bestseller or not – as a modern fairy tale it is terribly hackneyed, a “I’ll be gone then” St. James’ Way cliché for Berlin-Mitte hipsters. Even Henry David Thoreau, the “Walden” author and founder of all hippie escapism, was just an after-work hermit whose hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, blessed with all the amenities of civilization, was barely an hour’s walk from his cabin in the woods. Anyone who wants to retell this story for the present must not hide its inner contradictions. Otherwise, the audience will end up siding with the resolute father, who can no longer listen to the nonsense.