Review by Beatrice On 28-Nov-2023
Those who expect devils in the world to go about with horns and jesters with rattles will always be their prey and their laughingstock.
West Germany, near Rostock, near the sea.
Leon and Felix are on their way to the latter's family home to devote themselves to work.
They are stranded with their car broken down and have to walk to it by loading their luggage on their shoulders.
Leon is a writer and needs silence, peace and quiet to work, Felix has to make a portfolio of his own for the Berlin University of Art on the theme of water, and he has decided to resort to the sea.
Upon reaching the house in a pleasant place with a large garden, they notice that there is a big mess and the house is inhabited.
Felix calls his mother for explanations and learns that she has lent it to a colleague's daughter, a girl of Russian origin named Nadja.
The two friends will therefore only be able to share the smaller room to Leon's extreme disappointment.
They see the girl coming and going to work, and at night when they try to sleep they cannot because loud noises are heard of someone pleasantly engaging in amorous effusions.
Disturbed Leon douses himself with mosquito spray and goes to sleep in the garden and sees coming out of the house, naked, a handsome muscular boy whom he will meet the next day at the beach: the lifeguard.
The levity of Felix and the roommate will disturb the sober Leon who has gone there only to work and meet his publisher, but his plans will not be what he originally set out to do.
Amid dinners, insufferable jokes, invitations to the beach, music, and levity, the landscape that is arranged around Leon will continue to annoy him until his expectations, impatience, and prejudices are widely challenged.
From the centrality of his lived experience as an intellectual writer, Leon will have to reckon with his publisher and Nadja's judgment of his latest work, resoundingly tripping over the prejudice that had accompanied him.
A dinner party all together, including the lifeguard, will be the turning point of the situation: what Aristotle would call the indispensable metabolism of narrative, in this case film, that is, the qualitative alteration of narrative.
But in the meantime, the sky burns and nothing will be the same for anyone: it is not enough to look without seeing, nor to hear without listening; danger looms along with the radical change of places, facts and judgments.
An apparent comedy, funny, intriguing and mysterious is masterfully transformed into a great ethical lesson on the impossibility of superficially grasping not only geographical and topographical reality but also anthropological and existential reality.
Every essential form of the spirit lies in ambiguity. The more this form escapes comparison with others, the more it gives rise to a multiplicity of appearances.
28-Nov-2023 by Beatrice