2023-11-15 15:24:37
“If I weren’t so tired,” the man writes on a scratchy piece of paper as clumsily as he speaks when he speaks, “then I could laugh out of pure happiness.” Write it down. The thoughts of the love of his life, who died decades ago.
In front of him, behind the window of his hut, it is getting dark, are the mountains that were his love of life, that demanded everything from him and that he didn’t care about at all. Then he’s dead, Egger.
And you immediately envy him again, the man with the crooked leg, who spent his life at an angle to his surroundings. About his silent death. About his humility. About pure happiness after a life that was nothing but toil and torment, that was a constant turning of dolls in the maelstrom of history and just a little bit of luck.
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So you want to go there. With a melancholy laugh, an amazement, the strange feeling that everything was good even though everything was terrible.
It was like that the first time you met Egger Andreas. That was in Robert Seethaler’s novel. It was called “A Whole Life”. It was a bestseller and was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.
In 160 pages, the great actor in the truest sense of the word told the story of a mountain farm boy who, as the century has just begun, is sent to his uncle at the end of a valley.
Freedom between the chairs
His mother doesn’t want him because he’s a banker. The uncle doesn’t want him either, he just wants the money that Andreas carries in the bag around his neck. Andreas is not allowed to sit at the table with his uncle’s children. He stays outside.
He learns the hard way that there is freedom in being in the middle. Beaten by his uncle (“God, forgive me,” he shouts with every blow on his nephew’s bare bottom, he’s a complicated guy) until his leg breaks.
It then grows back together at an angle, takes longer to walk than the rest of the body, but at least it has the advantage that the Egger is the only one walking on the mountain.
Great love: Stefan Gorski as Egger and Julia Franz Richter as Marie
Which: TOBIS Film
He is four when he arrives in the dark valley, and a good 80 when he dies. Two world wars, several turning points later. “A Whole Life” is also the story of a transformation society, the most casual story imaginable. A cable car is being built and tourism is flourishing in the valley. People pay expensive money for skiing and a panorama that is self-evident to those who grew up with it and were influenced by it and its narrowness.
Electricity brings modernity and light and fancy cars to the valley and prosperity. The price is not asked. As in every transformation society, the Eggers pay it. The men are missing arms, legs, and some are missing their entire lives.
Every sentence in Seethaler’s novel fit like every step of Egger fit on the mountain. It soon became clear that the taciturn novel about the taciturn guy could not be prevented from being made into a film. It is a stroke of luck that it was Hans Steinbichler who really did a great job of revamping the Alpine homeland film.
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The mountains have had to endure a lot in recent years. In films and television, people were constantly hanging on steep slopes, falling, being rescued by public mountain rescuers and mountain doctors, providing the backdrop for family dramas and medical complications.
Cine Tirol alone has brought the Austrian state added value of a good 200 million euros. James Bond contributed, as did half a dozen television films and series.
What Hans Steinbichler is now doing is a kind of cinematic renaturalization of the mountain film. “A Whole Life” is a cinematic mountain farming museum, a recovery of a magical kind of realism.
The harshness and cold of Tyrol
Steinbichler is of course not alone in trying to remember the history of Alpine life and its changes due to the onset of modernity. Alain Gsponer’s “Heidi” film with Bruno Ganz as Alm-Öhi, for example, was based on the horror of the archaic agricultural world, on what the mountain demanded of people and could not have really pleased the idyllic Alpine tourism associations.
The adverse nature, the wet and cold, the anti-civilization, the dark Alpine myths, everything that made your bones shiver, no matter what time of year you surrendered to their stories, also brought such intentionally chic series as “The Pass” (Sky) and “The Dead Woman” (Netflix) made Tyrolean tourism officials sweat because of its harshness and cold.
Andreas Lust is the brutal uncle of Egger Andreas
Which: TOBIS Film
“A Whole Life” could now be the pinnacle of the new mountain realism, so to speak. You can’t get enough of the mountains and their mercilessness any more than you can get enough of those in Terrence Malick’s Nazi resistance epic “A Hidden Life.”
However, you should first ask the respective cinema operator to switch off the musical soundtrack. Steinbichler’s composer Matthias Weber poured a symphonic sauce over the peaks and images and stories that sends shivers down the spines of every aspiring alpinist and every mountain hiker.
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