Bee-yootifully made, humongous-scaled family saga of a German village on the route from Paris to Berlin from 1919 to 1982, focused on the Simon family who go from being rural blacksmiths to technology/architectural salvage/avantgarde music entrepreneurs.
The heart of the family is the beautiful Maria (Marita Breuer) whose husband Paul deserts her and her 2 sons in 1929 and eventually becomes an electronics magnate in the USA. Meanwhile. She takes up with a civil engineer/Wehrmacht bomb disposal technician in WWII and has a son by him. He is her true love.
The series follows the change in the village from almost mediaeval simplicity to being a cog in the techno-industrial world of the 1980s; the characters age, die, marry, have accidents, fall out, get drunk, have festivals, become Nazis, fly planes and helicopters, etc etc.
All is depicted expertly (apart from the Focke-Wulf 190s, they're Harvard trainers) and many directorial tricks will look modern to 21st century eyes; most of the acting is first class. If you are a vintage Mercedes fan the beautiful cars will keep you going through the Kubrick-esque longeurs which occur more frequently as the series goes on.
So why not the full ten stars? If you watch the first and second episodes, you'll gasp (or you should) at the realism and depth that Heimat gives the village (Schabbach) and its inhabitants. After season 2, Heimat slowly loses its mojo. It has truly brilliant flashes all the way through, but to me, one of the major bumps in the road was the casting of the older Paul Simon; somehow he goes from a sensitive 'All Quiet On The Western Front' type to a completely unconvincing, overbearing Franklin D. Roosevelt lookalike. And where did his black chauffeur sleep in 1949?
There are also later, deeply involved, story choices which focus on Maria's less interesting and yes, less convincing three sons. And in the end (SPOILER) it's simply a lead-on to more of the same in series two; there's no resolution or anything, which I suppose is true to the ethos of the series, but dramatically it's a big letdown.
Trying to be 'Les Enfants Du Paradis' meets 'Berlin Alexanderplatz', in the end 'Heimat' basically fizzles out. That might sound harsh, but hey; I put in 15 hours.
The heart of the family is the beautiful Maria (Marita Breuer) whose husband Paul deserts her and her 2 sons in 1929 and eventually becomes an electronics magnate in the USA. Meanwhile. She takes up with a civil engineer/Wehrmacht bomb disposal technician in WWII and has a son by him. He is her true love.
The series follows the change in the village from almost mediaeval simplicity to being a cog in the techno-industrial world of the 1980s; the characters age, die, marry, have accidents, fall out, get drunk, have festivals, become Nazis, fly planes and helicopters, etc etc.
All is depicted expertly (apart from the Focke-Wulf 190s, they're Harvard trainers) and many directorial tricks will look modern to 21st century eyes; most of the acting is first class. If you are a vintage Mercedes fan the beautiful cars will keep you going through the Kubrick-esque longeurs which occur more frequently as the series goes on.
So why not the full ten stars? If you watch the first and second episodes, you'll gasp (or you should) at the realism and depth that Heimat gives the village (Schabbach) and its inhabitants. After season 2, Heimat slowly loses its mojo. It has truly brilliant flashes all the way through, but to me, one of the major bumps in the road was the casting of the older Paul Simon; somehow he goes from a sensitive 'All Quiet On The Western Front' type to a completely unconvincing, overbearing Franklin D. Roosevelt lookalike. And where did his black chauffeur sleep in 1949?
There are also later, deeply involved, story choices which focus on Maria's less interesting and yes, less convincing three sons. And in the end (SPOILER) it's simply a lead-on to more of the same in series two; there's no resolution or anything, which I suppose is true to the ethos of the series, but dramatically it's a big letdown.
Trying to be 'Les Enfants Du Paradis' meets 'Berlin Alexanderplatz', in the end 'Heimat' basically fizzles out. That might sound harsh, but hey; I put in 15 hours.