ZAmong the questions that would be better not to be asked, but then are asked again and again, is what you think of the film you just saw. Of course you can answer that, in full sentences, with single words, with a pained facial expression or a raised thumb – but who comes out of the cinema with a ready judgment?
It’s often conflicting feelings and thoughts that preoccupy you, sometimes even excluding each other, and it’s possible that this state of affairs persists and doesn’t resolve itself while an attitude toward a film gradually forms. “One day we will tell each other everything” is one of these cases. There is too much that bothers you, not to say: annoying; there is at the same time a pull, a fascination that remains when individual moments, a facial expression, a gesture emerge in the memory.
The film by Emily Atef is based on the 2011 novel of the same name by Daniela Krien. Five years ago, Atef made a film about Romy Schneider together with Marie Bäumer, “Three Days in Quiberon”, which at times almost resembled a séance in which a deceased person appeared. She has a keen sense of actresses and their intensities, which is what this novel needs.
This time, too, the events are far back: in the summer of 1990, the first after reunification. The setting is a village in Thuringia. A three-sided courtyard with a view of the train tracks. Maria lives here in the attic with her boyfriend Johannes, whose parents own the farm. She often skips school and prefers to read Dostoyevsky.
The film title is supposed to be a quote from the “Brothers Karamazov”, which can probably be checked, but it wouldn’t get you any further. Rather, one might ask whether the cautious optimism resonating in the title fits the story; Wouldn’t the title of Judith Hermann’s new book suit her better: “We would have said everything to each other”.
It’s a hot summer full of new beginnings and worries about how things will continue after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The contemporary history provides more of a background noise, it gets louder for a moment when the uncle comes from the West with a Mercedes and good advice. Johannes’ parents took Maria in like a daughter, as a matter of course.
The first summer after reunification
Maria’s mother (Jördis Triebel) lives a few villages away, she struggles with both the new and the old times. Maria’s father left a long time ago. The mother has no talent for lightness. When she visits her daughter once, they drive down a hill in a Trabant; to save fuel, she disengages the clutch and pulls the ignition key. Luckily, no one is injured in the accident.
Johannes is a bit nerdy, even if the nerd hadn’t really taken shape as a social figure back then, he’s gentle and friendly, he dreams of a career as a photographer. It is easy to see that this young couple is very dissimilar, that Maria, although a little younger, is more mature, cooler, more private, often inscrutable. This impression is reinforced by the fact that the actress Marlene Burow has significantly more charisma than her counterpart Cedric Eich.