Wwhat was that again? German films are boring? Irrelevant? Do you always have the same relationship quark? “The Ordinaries”, Sophie Linnenbaum’s debut film, has finally been released in cinemas after 20 invitations to festivals within seven months – and everyone is already asking the director whether Hollywood has already knocked on her door. Because of the rights for a remake.
“Ordinaries” is as original as Charlie Kaufman’s “Being John Malkovich”, as nightmarish as Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” and as light-hearted as Gene Kelly’s “You Shall Be My Lucky Star”. Quite a lot for a graduation film at the University of Konrad Wolf in Babelsberg, which had to make do with a budget of 500,000 euros.
The characters in Linnenbaum’s film are film characters. What else, one is tempted to say. No, the special thing about it is that her entire life is organized like a film. It’s not for nothing that their world is called “Film World”. There are only three kinds of people in it: the lead roles, the supporting roles, and the bugs. The residents there don’t play, they do are. They don’t stand for like they usually do in the cinema somethinghere they just stand for themselves. Are members of one or another or third caste.
World in pastel: the minor characters
Source: Gang Film
The main roles have it best. Their world is bright, colorful and carefree, every now and then they burst out singing and dancing out of sheer joy of existence. The supporting roles aren’t doing so well. They are gray mice, their blocks of houses drown in GDR gray, it’s greyish in their apartments. Your vocabulary is limited; logical, supporting roles don’t have much to say, they usually stand around in the background when they’re not serving the food or sweeping the streets, and in any case have no story of their own, no feelings of their own.
daughter of a supporting role
This brings us to Paula, who as the daughter of a supporting role is actually destined for a supporting role. But the film world provides an opportunity for advancement, as does our world for the one dishwasher among the million dishwashers who can become a millionaire. She goes to protagonist school, where you have to prove that you have charisma, a presence, an aura, everything that is required of a protagonist.
Paula (Fine Sendel, previously only known as the daughter of Gabriela Maria Schmeide in the series “Tina mobil”, a supporting role) is good at cliffhangers and screaming in panic, but before the test in big emotions she has jitters. The dream factory needs big feelings. Main character students therefore wear a heart reader, a device that registers emotions and converts them into music. Paula’s music, however, sounds sad. Isn’t she the stuff that leading roles are made of? Or is she just not trying hard enough, in the spirit of the Neolib mantra that anyone can achieve anything if they really want it?
On the trail of the family secret: Paula (Fine Sendel)
Source: Gang Film
Now let’s not forget the third demographic: the movie bugs. What happens to film mistakes, i.e. unsuccessful scenes, superfluous characters, miscasts – with everything that the editor cuts out of the film, the “outtakes”? There is no place for them in the film world, so they are banished to a militarily shielded ghetto. A few years ago there was said to have been an uprising of film mistakes, unsuccessfully, the dream factory had the upper hand. Paula’s main role father, the mother tells her, died in the rebellion.
And what is this now?
It is not difficult to see in the film world the real-capitalist division of ours. And there is no parallel world to escape to, no dome to break out of like Jim Carrey does on The Truman Show. There is, just like here, the one percent of the population that owns a third of the fortune (the leading roles in the film), there are the middle class sinking into gray mediocrity (the supporting roles) and the service proletariat (the film mistakes).
Is this science fiction now? social fiction? social satire? “The Ordinaries” is teeming with meta levels. There is the parable for our class society, in which the upper class needs an underclass to be exploited and a middle class hoping for advancement and fearing relegation. The reminder that for decades, the price of Hollywood glamor was a rigorous caste system of oppression and discrimination. The trend for young people to present themselves on social media as if they were the stars of their own film. And last but not least, the current discourse on representation and how narratives shape reality.
But the best thing is that you don’t even have to discover these levels. One can simply be enchanted by Linnenbaum’s often bizarre but always consistent ideas. Why is Paula’s mother (Jule Böwe) unable to comfort her daughter, only spouting banalities like “I was worried about you”? Of course, she’s a supporting role, and supporting roles have neither depth nor differentiated vocabulary.
Why are a few frames always missing when a young film bug moves? Sure, he stands for the jump cut, the jump in the picture frowned upon in classic cinema. Why do some outtakes have pixelated mouths? Simple, they were muzzled. Why is there laughter even though the underground bar lady didn’t say anything funny? Bad luck, the sitcom laughter from the can is recorded at the wrong time.
A furious debut: director Sophie Linnenbaum
Those: picture alliance/dpa/CTK/Katerina Sulova
Sophie Linnenbaum – sister of the theater director Laura Linnenbaum – has expanded her short film “Out of Frame” – in which Jonas Laux “falls out of the picture” out of sheer loneliness, cannot find his way back into it and ends up in a self-help group of film errors – into a whole universe; she didn’t just inflate the short film to full-length, as many do. You have to be extremely careful not to miss any subtleties and to be on the right level of meaning at the right moment.
Hollywood will certainly be busy polishing that up and sanding down the class aspect once it digs into a remake (“No, nobody’s come forward on that yet,” says Linnenbaum). In any case, “The Ordinaries” is probably the most ambitious university graduation film since Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s “The Lives of Others”. More of that.