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.
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.