Dhe tenth birthday is a precarious event in a child’s life. At least when it has the sometimes dubious honor of starring in a German film. A lot is demanded of ten-year-olds. Because adults aren’t much help to ten-year-olds, because they need to be more adult than adults, because they expect something from life that adults have long given up expecting. luck for example.
Their names are Benni and Jack and Ronny. “Jack” (which Oscar winner Edward Berger shot when he was still directing sensitive everyday stories and not international slaughter records) and “Ronny” (about which everything revolves in the new Magdeburg “Polizeiruf”) immediately gave their films the titles. Benni is the “system crasher” with which Helena Zengel began an international career and for which Nora Fingscheidt was nominated for an Oscar.
The stories are similar. The way they are told is also similar. And you can’t always get rid of them. Because they tell of lives that are poisoned by the inability of parents, educators, and society to take responsibility for beings who find it difficult to defend themselves.
How it is for such a being when it doesn’t understand what’s happening to it can be seen in “Ronny” for almost two minutes. Ronny, it’s his tenth birthday and he’s in the home, sitting in his bed. You can see him through the bars of the bed. He writes to his mother. that it’s his birthday. And that he doesn’t understand that she doesn’t get in touch.
He’s trapped in a context he didn’t choose. The mother used to be dependent. She loves her son, she would like to have him back. But she doesn’t get him. Because she is unstable, they say. Because the boyfriend with whom she now has a child doesn’t want Ronny to live with them.
Sabine (Ceci Chuh) wants her child back
Which: MDR/Stefan Erhard
That’s actually always the case in the ten-year-olds’ stories of woe in the film. They despair of the mothers, who are unstable, let themselves be carried away, and perhaps would have been better off not having children.
However, “Ronny” is a special case. A film – says the director Barbara Ott – “about the love for our children – about the fear that we will lose them”. A crime drama of authentic, elliptical dialogue (masterfully written by Grimme Prize winner Jan Braren), speaking looks, gestures and things (masterfully staged by Barbara Ott). A cycle of variations, so to speak, of stories about three mothers who lose their children, who lose their children.
“Be careful friend”
Ronnie disappears. In the home, with favorite teacher Matthias (Thomas Schubert, who was “King of Stonks” and is now playing in Christian Petzold’s “Red Sky”) and home manager Gaby (Maja Schöne), there was cake and confetti and a new fishing rod and a new bicycle. At home with mother Sabine (Ceci Chuh), there was cake and a drone and a beating from mother’s new life partner René.
“Watch out, friend,” René had threatened when Ronny let the drone fly in the living room. “Mom, help me…” Ronny called out when René dragged him into the next room. Sabine hadn’t known what to do with her eyes or her fingers. She sat there paralyzed.
Then Ronny was gone. stayed away It’s cold outside. He wanted to go fishing on Matthias’ boat, he announced in a video message. He doesn’t have much of a chance of surviving.
Matthias (Thomas Schubert) was Ronny’s (Johann Barnstorf) favorite tutor
Which: MDR/Stefan Erhard
When the inspector comes along, her name is Doreen Brasch, Claudia Michelsen is playing her for the 17th time, and the trio of frightened people is complete, the mothers who lose their children or the mothers whose children slip away from them. Sabine anyway. The single mother Gaby, who has a highly passive (sometimes actively) aggressive communication with her pubescent, but not only because of that strange son Gordon.
And the commissioner, from whose life her son disappeared years ago, who slipped away from her. Incidentally, fathers do not appear at all. The world of children’s homes is a fatherless society. Which of course has consequences for the drama that is happening.
“Ronny” plays through everything. Sabine’s anger, who lashes out, lashes out at everyone she holds responsible for Ronny’s possible death, including herself in the end. Gaby’s desperate rebellion against the suspicion that more could be wrong with Gordon than she suspects anyway.
Brasch’s overwhelmingly insomniac attempt to find truth somewhere beyond the protective barriers of others’ (and herself’s) motherhood as she rushes from one guilt to the next.
The fragility, not least of the relationships between children and their educators, the misunderstandings that explode under pressure, the educators’ susceptibility to blackmail when young people use their power to denounce, if any suspicion arises at all (“Ronny” and Thomas Vinterberg’s pedagogical hell “Die Jagd” are not dissimilar in that).
The home manager Gabi (Maja Schöne) fails to communicate with her son Gordon (Valentin Oppermann).
What: MDR/Felix Abraham
“Ronny” is told – children’s films bring out the best of the medium, possibly because they force them to be discreet – in gestures, in looks, in images, in sequences that don’t need words to tell the story behind the story.
Which, in turn, only works because Barbara Ott can rely on the images that Falko Lachmann (“Waiting for a bus”) provided to her. And on Jan Braren’s texts reduced to the absolutely necessary and absolutely natural. And actors who can compensate for all ellipses, all silences in their dialogues with minimally invasive facial expressions, and who can make all pauses eloquently.
Michelsen’s “Calls to the Police” were always the earthiest, most everyday, most human of all Sunday evening detective stories. “Ronny” sets the new – how do you say it, how would you never call it in Saxony-Anhalt – benchmark.