Dhe German television, especially public television, has a reputation for only being able to tell murder and manslaughter stories. Which is also true – perhaps not in the claimed exclusivity.
Broadcast day after broadcast day, vast numbers of dead people are dumped in the living rooms of this republic. And bury all other genres that would be possible in the so-called television game.
Which has its justification insofar as the crime film itself, Dominik Graf understands it at least – if you take it seriously, which hardly anyone else does like Graf – is perhaps the most powerful and precise and probably the most contemporary world explanation machine. Dominik Graf, of all people, shows what one forgives oneself, for example, when one voluntarily abandons the love story to the kitsch of Sunday evening pilcherism under the pressure of repression of serial television murders.
The film is called “Face of Remembrance”. He runs with the public service. And it is perhaps – one should be careful with anticipations in February – the most beautiful love film of the year. It is definitely one of the most beautiful Dominik Graf films.
You can also see it as a psychological thriller. Or as a ghost story. Or as a story of late growing up. Graf reaches deep into the toolbox of means and possibilities of romantic love drama. As always with Dominik Graf, you shouldn’t be afraid of breaking the genre. Not afraid of spiders either. But more on that later.
The case is as follows: Christina is a physiotherapist in Salzburg. With her physique everything seems fine so far. Not with her psyche. The first quarter of an hour is a single plunge through consciousness, the memories, through the presence of the beautiful woman with the short hair, which gives her head a support that her being hasn’t had since Jacob died.
In the network of metaphors
She was 16 when she loved him. Out in the cobweb forest, in a ruin. He was twenty years older. That’s twenty years ago. The images are still shooting through her mind. She can’t fight back. They are brightly colored. Flicker, haunt around.
You see cobwebs all the time. Spiders crawl, weave threads between times and levels of consciousness. “Face of Memory” is a highly symbolic web of metaphors, in whose web one is caught before one has found the remote control while fleeing from the impending overload.
Then one day Jacob drove back to his family. And died on a dead straight road, the one with the fewest accidents in the Salzach Valley near St. Johann. Not a kilometer away, Patrick was born at almost the same hour.
Fabian Busch is Jacob, Christina’s great love
Quelle: SWR/Jacqueline Krause-Burberg
Now Patrick is a musician, looks very cute under his wild mane. The parents are extremely rich, but the driveway up to the magnificent concrete bungalow takes half an eternity, which is not due to the shabby Golf that Patrick is traveling with.
Patrick picks up Christina. She wasn’t having a good evening. She walks barefoot through a rainy summer night in Salzburg. She collapsed at the disco. The images of her life had ambushed her from behind in her brain.
Then she sits in the Golf. And love and an announced disaster take their course. Christina sees Jacob sitting where Patrick is sitting. Delusion and desire and reality blur. “Am I becoming schizophrenic?” Christina asks her therapist. The pills she takes don’t help the sadness, don’t help the loss.
Patrick could help. Christina discovers Jacob in Patrick, changes him, adapts him to her dream image like Pygmalion once did. “What if that love and that person is always one and the same?” she asks. Hitchcock’s “From the Realm of the Dead” is one of many undercurrents running through this mixture of melancholic mystery and romantic tragedy.
Everything works together in this magical web. The obscure mixture of transmigration hocus-pocus and emotional madness. The sound cascades and finger-scratched tones by Sven Rossenbach and Florian Van Volxem, Graf’s entire noise composition, the candy-colored, super-8-grained and dust-free realistically oscillating images by Hendrik A. Kley, the rooms and landscapes.
Verena Altenberger as the spider woman, who can no longer get out of the flooded mind. Alessandro Schuster, who successfully applies to be Germany’s next Tom Schilling. And Dominik Graf, who, in his – well – old age kisses an entire genre awake.