February 20, 2024
Josef Hader as religious teacher Franz and Birgit Minichmayr as policewoman Andrea: a community of fate © wega film/Darryl Oswald
Josef Hader returns home. Double the same, because the Upper Austrian national anthem sounds during the first picture of his new film “Andrea gets divorced”, the following story about a policewoman on the move in the middle of nowhere in Lower Austria will take place. Hader, born in Upper Austria, grew up in the Lower Austrian part of the border area.
In “The Wild Mouse” – the Hader-directed predecessor from 2017 – it is the no longer young man in the federal capital who is in crisis. Now it is a woman who is about to leave her home. To St. Pölten.
Andrea’s crisis is quite diverse. She’s actually a tough police officer, the boss of her post. She knows what to expect when she goes to the inn and everyone knows that she has separated from her husband Andi. And she also knows how to react when a drunk – probably not for the first time – asks for revenge for every time he had to blow the policewoman. Here too, Andrea’s face remains impassive, even when she pours half of it between his legs. It is how it is here.
Women don’t have it easy in Hader’s country
And here, in the countryside, the women at Hader don’t have it easy. When the woman drives a car, the male companion drinks 12 beers, gin and tonic is generally not alcohol and even after several shots of claret, the testosterone group still dares to say that they haven’t drunk anything anyway.
That’s the premise, that’s just how it is. And that’s why Andrea has to have an unpleasant conversation with her husband, take his car keys away and be insulted. When she catches him driving home at night in her car, runs him over and can’t revive him, she makes a decision that she won’t let go of. She gets into her white Golf and just drives away.
She even stuffs herself with cake when she feels like eating
Josef Hader, the director, made a really good choice when he cast Birgit Minichmayr as Andrea. Because you can’t imagine many actresses who manage to perform most of their acting introspectively. Andrea puts up with so much, so much nonsense that people say and do, so much well-intentioned and so much insidious. She always remains calm, always behaves “according to the circumstances”, and even stuffs herself with cake when she actually feels like eating.
Only one person seems to be able to shake her facade, and that is the very man who has to take on her guilt. The religion teacher Franz Leitner, a dry alcoholic whose school hours involve the students just playing around on their cell phones, overlooked Andi lying in the middle of the street, ran over him and is now, in the eyes of everyone, the culprit for the man’s death. Only Andrea knows what really happened and her conscience drives her to help the man who is ready to take everything on himself, spend the rest of his time in prison and has already packed his suitcase to do so. Hader (as co-author alongside Florian Kloibhofer) wrote this role specifically for himself, which he takes on himself. A moment that says everything about Leitner: He no longer replaces the sealing ring on his espresso pot. It no longer pays off, he says with conviction.
The crucial point of her life so far
A tender togetherness develops, but the focus remains on Andrea, who was already at a crucial point in her life before the accident.
With an excellent cast – in addition to Minichmayr and Hader, Thomas Schubert, Maria Hofstätter and Robert Stadlober also convince in the tragically funny story – “Andrea gets divorced” tells a lot about life in the country, about jumping ship and leaving behind and ultimately about opportunities. Even if the first scene, in which the policewoman monitors the empty street with the radar gun and all that comes for a long time is a tractor, suggests a country crime thriller, the crime plot remains in the background. Rather, it is a moral picture that Josef Hader drew. A moral image of the homeland.
Von Mariella Moshammer