2023-10-03 16:53:47
If the aim of these lines were to write a history of the cinema adaptations of those books that have been awarded the German Book Prize since 2005 as the best German-language novels of the year at the beginning of the Frankfurt Book Fair, then they could already end here. Until Barbara Albert’s adaptation of Julia Franck’s “The Midday Woman” came to the cinema – awarded in 2007, translated into almost forty languages, published in more than a million copies – there was not a single one. And they could also use Miesepeter as a prime example of everything that is going wrong in this country, because everything is going so terribly slowly.
That’s why we first have to tell a story. Which is quite fitting because the Midday Woman, a legendary figure from the Slavic fairy tale kingdom, demands exactly that from the farmers in the field. To tell a story. Of herself. If she doesn’t like it, she takes out the scythe and then that’s it with the farmers.
also read
“Eldorado KaDeWe” series
The story of the “Lunch Woman” is a story from Julia Franck’s family. The story of a woman who, while fleeing at the end of the war, places her son on a bench at a train station. And disappears.
The novel begins with this scene. What then follows is a narrative that, in retrospect, is almost full of allusions to debates that almost no one could have thought of in 2007: Regretting Motherhood, female self-empowerment and their mental and physical confinement in patriarchy, the resulting blindness of a heart, traces of the current identity discourses, the questioning of masculinity, the warning sign of the consequences of a National Socialist image of the family and mother for women, to which the AfD, which was not yet founded in 2007, longs to return.
Half a century in Germany
The woman’s name is Helene Würsich. She grew up in Bautzen. She is half-Jewish. The First World War devastated her family. Today she could be anything. During her lifetime she becomes a plaything of the passage of time. The story of Helene Würsich, who moves to the roaring Weimar Berlin, who wants to become a doctor but can only become a nurse, who easily falls in love with a poetry-loving philosopher, but who soon has a fatal accident.
She is married by a Nazi who buys her love with a new, Aryan identity, and her life becomes increasingly narrow and grayer and heavier. Helene’s story is one of self-loss, of a blindness of heart. And – at least in the novel – above all, the determination of the causes of a human catastrophe.
also read
You could have easily made a series out of “Lunch Woman”. The fact that it didn’t happen could be a consequence of the streaming crisis. Or due to the fact that in the 16 years since the novel was published, not only have all of the almost visionary topics been discussed to the point of exhaustion, but there have also been series in the last half dozen years that have reached the point of exhaustion, in which exactly this time panorama is drawn up with almost exactly the same focus on the consequences of the outbreak of Nazi madness on women’s freedom of movement.
This runs through “Babylon Berlin”, in which Charlotte Ritter has a completely different family and social background and follows a completely different, much more feminist path than in Volker Kutscher’s novels. Sherry Hormann and Umut Dag played this out in “The House of Dreams,” the multi-part film about a Jewish department store in Berlin that now houses the luxury resort Soho House.
This held together the second season of the hospital series “Charité,” which dealt with Ferdinand Sauerbruch and the Nazi era. This was particularly radical and dirty and beautiful in Julia von Heinz’s “El Dorado KaDeWe”, which was of course a series about the history of a department store, but even more so about women’s attempts at sexual self-empowerment and the self-liberation of their bodies.
Trailer “The Midday Woman”
Here you will find content from YouTube
In order to display embedded content, your revocable consent to the transmission and processing of personal data is necessary, as the providers of the embedded content require this consent as third party providers [In diesem Zusammenhang können auch Nutzungsprofile (u.a. auf Basis von Cookie-IDs) gebildet und angereichert werden, auch außerhalb des EWR]. By setting the switch to “on”, you agree to this (revocable at any time). This also includes your consent to the transfer of certain personal data to third countries, including the USA, in accordance with Art. 49 (1) (a) GDPR. You can find more information about this. You can revoke your consent at any time using the switch and privacy at the bottom of the page.
Anyone who has seen all of this will find the contours of the stories blurring before their eyes and develop delusions that everyone’s fates will intersect at some point and that everything will combine to form an almost Marvel-esque super-series cosmos. In any case, the gap for “The Lunch Woman – The Series” would have been frighteningly narrow.
You can see that in Barbara Albert’s film. He tries so hard to avoid contemporary history series clichés, to look similar to something from television, that he becomes aesthetically out of balance, gets lost in episodes and crumbles in search of a visual language.
Julia Franck’s dramaturgy almost changed Albert into a serial one anyway. “The Lunch Woman” begins not at the train station, but in the countryside a good decade later. Not with an act of desperation, but with an attempt at reconciliation. Which almost reduces Franck’s story to absurdity. From then on, Helene’s story is told chronologically – partly in desaturated memory sequences – except for sketchy and superfluous flash-forwards to the farm from the beginning.
also read
Albert otherwise intervenes little in the story. But where she does it, it is either superfluous – Karl, Helene’s great love of poetry, does not have an accident on the street, he is killed by Nazis. Or at least it’s strange – the rape of Helene by Soviet soldiers, which her son observes and finally deprives her of the idea of being able to decide over her body, over herself as a woman, breaks her, almost forces her to leave her child alone and with a perhaps better one To leave life behind, Barbara leaves Albert out. Which feels strange politically at the moment and doesn’t help the psychology of the film very much.
There is actually only one reason to let the “lunch woman” tell you her story. And this is Mala Emde. Here, however, you have to be careful not to get confused in the contemporary history series supercosmos. After all, Mala Emde was Ferdinand Sauerbruch’s pregnant doctoral student Anni Waldhausen in “Charité”.
Here you will find content from YouTube
In order to display embedded content, your revocable consent to the transmission and processing of personal data is necessary, as the providers of the embedded content require this consent as third party providers [In diesem Zusammenhang können auch Nutzungsprofile (u.a. auf Basis von Cookie-IDs) gebildet und angereichert werden, auch außerhalb des EWR]. By setting the switch to “on”, you agree to this (revocable at any time). This also includes your consent to the transfer of certain personal data to third countries, including the USA, in accordance with Art. 49 (1) (a) GDPR. You can find more information about this. You can revoke your consent at any time using the switch and privacy at the bottom of the page.
Helene Würsich is her masterpiece, for Helene Würsich acting awards should rain down on her. How she allows her body to become heavier and heavier without visibly gaining weight. How her looks, gestures, movements change, the closer, the less free she becomes, the more tormented by life.
How she makes the gray in her face shine. Great stories told with minimal facial expressions. She is always and everywhere in this film. She is this film. Without them it would be heart-blind contemporary history with a gold edge.
Of course, no one believes that it will end almost well in the end, that there can be peace with life, with history. And politically it would almost be a reason for increased reflection.
#Film #Midday #Woman #story #story #late