Die Blumen von gestern (2016) Reviews

• Kraus showing the rest how it is to be done

  Horst_In_Translation2017-07-23

  "Die Blumen von gestern" or "The Bloom of Yesterday" is a German film from last year (2016) and this one is the most recent work by writer and director Chris Kraus. His most known work so far is "4 Minuten" and I believe this one to be pretty overrated, so my expectations for this one here weren't too big, but overall it was a successful watch I'd say. Nicely done. It is a pretty long film, makes it past the 2-hour mark and yet it never drags at all. While I don't mind Lars Eidinger as an actor, this is the first time he really impressed me and he is certainly deserving of his Best Lead Actor at the German Film Awards. The late Sigrid Marquardt was nominated for Supporting Actress, but I am not really on par with her nomination. I guess it may have had to do with her death and because of the character's background, but performance-wise it wasn't anything too special I would say. It's not that she was bad or anything, but the one who really deserved the nomination, even if she was probably lead is Adèle Haenel who breezes so much life into this movie. I read former Bond girl Eva Green was also considered for the part and I'd be curious about what her portrayal would have looked like, but I must say Haenel was close to perfect in here. Admittedly her looks don't hurt either. The subject in this film is once again like in so many other German movies the Holocaust. And still the movie proves that if your approach and execution is competent and creative enough, then it is still possible, after all these years and movies, to add something new and valuable to the subject. Of course, the competent performances are helping the matter too. This probably excludes Hannah Herzsprung who also starred in 4 Minutes and has a supporting part in this one, namely playing the main character's (not so) significant other. Her character adds very little to the story and could have been left out completely. Even a limited actor like Jan Josef Liefers made a bigger impact here than she did and that says quite something. Anyway, back to the positive: With a reference to the title of my review, I believe that this film is an excellent example of how to combine comedy, romance and relevance in one movie. This is something that the likes of Schweighöfer (and maybe M'Barek) and some others have been trying for years and have failed gloriously every single attempt. They can really learn a whole lot from these 120 minutes here, but I doubt they will because they prefer making films that are for the easily entertained masses that don't understand depth even if it hits them right in the very face. This film here has a great deal of depth and it pretty much delivers in terms of everything it tries to be. I was certainly way closer to giving this one a ****/***** than to a **/*****, but eventually 3 stars out of 5 is enough as not all the dramatic moments are really working 100%. Most of them are though. The film gets a lot more serious at the one-hour mark while everything before that is mostly comedy. That's a bit surprising as the film also focuses more on romance in the second half. So it is not a romantic comedy then. More of a romantic drama perhaps. And a really strong character study when it comes to Eidinger and Haenel, who without a doubt are among the best their countries have to offer from their respective age groups. This film is the evidence. And the ending is the obvious evidence too that this is not another generic German stupid comedy with a happy ending. It is all about authenticity instead and that's all you can ask for. Go see it as this one is deserving of all the awards attention it received. And the final (and maybe biggest) thumbs-up goes to the excellent Carla Bruni song used on several occasions and I just can't stop listening to it.

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• Grandchildren of the Holocaust meet, love and separate.

  maurice_yacowar2017-11-23

  The blooms of yesterday? What blooms is the present: beautiful, fresh, alive — and doomed. Flowers die, beauties fade. Blooms are either now or preserved in our memories, what we remember of them, not as they survive pressed flat, dry and dead between pages or in a frame. This film's blooms of yesterday are what grew out of the seeds planted in the past. In this case the seeds in question are the Holocaust. The blooms that blossomed from them are the central romantic couple, Totila Blumen and Zazie Lindau. They have differing but connected blooms, outgrowths, of the Holocaust seed. His grandfather killed her grandmother. Indeed, he slaughtered all the Jews from his old class at school. This film sparks against earlier films. This Blumen in love evokes George Segal in Paul Mazursky's Blume in Love even if only in name. The madcap Zazie springs from Louis Malle's eponymous film of an anarchist female spirit, here exploring a psychological version of the original's Metro underground. As a couple they evoke Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in the screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby. (Spoiler alert: she indeed does end up bringing up his baby.) He is the dour, fumbling academic and she is the madcap force of nature. Inevitably, as opposites meet cute and attract, they fall in love. The "baby" in this film is not the living jungle animal but the dead eternal Holocaust. It can't be tamed or sung to or leashed and it should not be forgotten. But the Holocaust that drew them together inevitably drives them apart. For in its aftermath, normal romance, normal fictions, normal relationships whether in life or in genre, cannot slip comfortably into any usual pattern. The characters have to find their own ways to deal with the monstrous past. The Holocaust makes normal normalcy inconceivable. Totie, a scholar of the Holocaust, struggles to stage a symposium that his just-dead mentor planned. Zazie is the French intern assigned to him. She loves him for his published work and as a model of the modern German breaking free from the nation's antisemitism. She's also having an affair with the married Balthazar, whom the mentor promoted over Totie because of Totie's raging temper. Love and politics pointedly converge. Totie's rage turns out to be directed as much against himself as against Balthazar. That may also be the cause of his impotence. Unable to satisfy the wife he loves, he encourages her to have sex with strangers. That only feeds his self-hatred. Zazie snaps him out of his impotence. Despite their instinctive antagonism, they fall in love and plan to run away together. But learning that Totie was himself a Nazi drives Zazie away. Their last meeting in the department store at Christmas is wrenching. Zazie says she has a a woman partner and introduces her five-year-old son "Maurice," blond like Totie. But Totie's adopted daughter heard her call him by another name, the pet name the lovers used when they joked about him impregnating her their one night together. Whatever his name, he is the bloom of that five-year-old seed — which Totie can now only futilely pursue. Generation after generation has to confront the Holocaust, by themselves for themselves. Zazie moves on to her own new life and raising her son. Totie is reconnected to his wife and — edging away from his violent focus on the Holocaust — working on other, international issues of bigotry and the suppression of a people. Like Canada and its Indians. In the screwball comedies the quarrelling heroes fall in love and wed. But not here, not in the shadow of the Holocaust. Conventions don't apply now. Totie and Zazie have to pass through each other to find themselves.

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• Holocaust Screwball Rom-Com Tragedy

  arrieuking2018-07-25

  FIrst impression: This movie is hard for a non-German to completely digest, at least the first two thirds. One can't quite figure out who the characters are and why they are and why they are funny. It's like a really unhinged French Katherine Hepburn type has found a very cranky old academic. The tone seem kind of uneven. The trailer makes this look like a rom-com. The two leads are doing a great job with their material and Eidinger, I think, hits some serious "rain cloud over my head" notes not usually seen in his other roles. The dialogue doesn't quite ever sink into the fresh personal unscripted spaces that these actors seem primed to explore. Everything they say feels either shaded with exposition because it really doesn't make sense how these two can stand each other nor perservere after their "reveals" OR they are flying off the handle in way that breaks verisimilitude. Zazie veers from immature to fragile, to irate, to seemingly sexually manic, and in the end, that's how the character really is. Totila thinks a woman can know she's pregnant the morning after sex and that just seems like something uh...unbelievable. The last third of the movie is just crushingly touching and harrowing. It takes a lot to get me to cry and a certain bar scene towards the wee hours really tore me up. A German critic said the movie might have been better left as a comedy. That would be the American version though, and from the "happy ending" scene to the end is quite an emotional and plot-driven roller coaster. I think this is the only movie in the world that has ever made it funny for someone to say in a deadpan tone, "Yes, my family was in the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei" (Nazi party). It's worth seeing if you are into very strange comedies.

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