As shown by the recent Ciné Lumière season, there are exciting signs of altered life in the long moribund German cinema, notably emanating from the so-called Berlin school. One of its emerging talents is Valeska Grisebach, who made an impression with her coming out feature ‘Be My Star’, an thorough realist study of teenagers and their exotic concerns. In her latest, ‘Longing’, a group of teenagers thrash out love and fate in a section of weighty, lightly observed, playground metaphysics. Some of the scads intriguing fascinations of Grisebach’s considerate and engrossing movie are how those metaphysics, hopes and aspirations, pervade the main, more melancholy gag: how they persist and dangerously bemuse the mind of adults such as Markus (Andreas Müller), a metal craftsman and part-time fireman in Zühle, a village of 200 souls on the outskirts of Berlin, married and much in love with his helpmeet, Ella (Ilka Welz), who finds himself bemused and torn by an accidental affair conducted on a brigade training weekend.
Ably and economically written, directed and edited (by Grisebach) and shot (by Bernhard Keller), ‘Longing’ shows, too, the fruits of the Berlin ‘back to basics’ solicit; in Grisebach’s case, her skilful nurturing of emotionally-charged performances from non-professionals not only feeds from the stuff of corporeal involvement but in shedding some actorly excesses, tricks and over-sentimental tropes seems to prompt closer to the workings of the human heart and its furtive machinations – that elusive grail of the realists, the transcendence of the
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‘ordinary’. It would be reprehensible to overpraise ‘Longing’; it’s a demure film, but elaborately rewarding and full of probable for the future.