This is a time jumping tale of the women of one family over the course of a century during which they come of age and are abused by the people, especially the men, around them.
I honestly don't know what to say about this film. The telling is so jumbled I'm not certain what the point was. A woman's life is pain? Men are bad? Something else? I'm not sure.
The problem is that the film never makes anything clear. Set in and around the same house in Germany the periods blur together. There is no effort to let us know who anyone is, when we are or anything else. We know that the characters are the the same people late in the game with a reference by one character to events in another section. We don't know that the location is East Germany until a stray reference to a character going to West Germany. We never know that one section is set during the second world war until there is a reference to some of the women drowning themselves in the river before the Allies arrive. Honestly we don't even know who most of the characters are because the movie doesn't make clear who they are. We hear names but the film doesn't make clear who they are. We are adrift and the film never makes any effort to tie it all together. (I'm sure the press notes explain it all but films have to stand on their own, we should not have to read what a filmmaker wants us to get out of a film, it should be clear in the film itself.)
It doesn't help that sections of the film are cartoony and over done. For example the pervy uncle is so overt in his chasing his niece that I laughed. I couldn't believe that the behavior between two didn't have his family talking to them? At the same time almost all of the men in the film are portrayed in a bad light, from pervy, to ineffectual, to mean. Outside of one bit of narration that one of the women left, we never hear a good word from a man.
Things become complicated as the film begins to add in a sense of magical realism. There are references to the characters flying off- something we see literally at the end in a WTF moment that comes from no where.
I have about 15 pages of notes on the film which are more or less questions about what was happening. I repeatedly wrote "I hope they pull this together"
They never did.
While I liked bits of this film, the film did nothing for me. It's so jumbled I can't even guess as to what the point of it all is. My inclination is to say that the filmmakers did what several filmmakers I knew in school would do which was take a film that wasn't working the way they intended and re ordered it randomly selling it to the teachers as an art project, which they accepted because they couldn't see that they are being snowed.
Don't get snowed, skip this mess.
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