With a career that began in the 1980s, and with a career that spans both cinema and television, Matthias Glasner has been somewhat out of the spotlight of German 7th art, and even further away from the international stage. With several feature films and series under his belt, Gleisner attended the Berlinale three times, first with “Brake Wille” (2006), then with “Gnade” (2012) and now with “Sterben” (2014).
This latest work of his, winner of the award for best screenplay at the Berlinale, is easily the most mature and complex object he has dealt with (although the psychology surrounding his 2006 film deserves a revisit from critics), presenting a narrative thickness of such a dense form that only actors in great shape can absorb and transfer to the big screen with great brilliance.
Dramatic epic of enormous blackness around a family full of dysfunctions, “Sterben” gives greater attention to Tom (Lars Eidinger in a sensational performance), the conductor of an orchestra, who has to deal with family and personal collapse while preparing the opening of a new show. The father has dementia, the mother has a terminal illness and the sister deals with emotional precariousness and a serious addiction problem. As if that weren’t enough, his best friend and colleague, Bernard (Robert Gwisdeck), who composed the symphony (called “Sterben” or “Dying”) that he tunes with the orchestra, has serious problems with depression and suicidal tendencies, in addition to frequently interfering during rehearsals, insulting the musicians and Tom, never revealing himself capable of accepting that his work is finished. To this must be added the complex relationship with an ex-partner, who had a child with another man, but which he agreed to take over.
If for Tom conducting the orchestra proves to be an arduous task in the art of imposing himself as helmsman of a work that the author himself feels incomplete, conducting everything else – family relationships, friends and partners – proves to be a permanent traumatic path of zigzags , embedded in holes, bumps, and several ditches.
Divided into volumes, which take place over 180 minutes, “Sterben” begins by introducing us to Tom’s parents, in the midst of true filth and emotional and psychological chaos: his father, Gerd (Hans-Uwe Bauer), lives in a perfect state of dementia and often leaves the house half naked; and the mother, with a cancerous illness, Lissy (Corinna Harfouch, cannot bear the pain of her terminal condition and often defecates without wanting to. But if the pain of this woman’s illness is enormous, they are paralleled by Tom’s in relation to mother, who has no problem saying how unwanted he was when he arrived and that throughout his life the hatred between the two was mutual. A conversation between the two, before her “departure”, I assume the role of the climax of the first part of this film, which progressively details the lives of all those mentioned in the volumes that follow, leaving the question of legacy and what of that legacy we choose to maintain in our own lives and experiences hanging in the air, leaving in the process our own marks of a passage through fleeting life. This is how it is with Tom’s family, who inherited from his mother, like his brother, an aptitude for music, and this is how it is with Bernard, who wants to leave with his musical creation a testament to his life and the desire to die.
Moving through terrains of very dark drama that can often be seen as a “soap opera”, especially in the chapter dedicated to Tom’s sister, (Lilith Stangenberg trying to escape clichés), Matthias Glasner manages to devise a project that in most of its time feels deeply cinematic, but is not without some erratic mishaps, never as strong as the emotional ones of the family portrayed.
In the end, here is a film about life as a process on the path to death, what we hold onto from our ancestors, and what we decide to keep as fuel for personal affirmation. And it is always a dark and unoptimistic film, because even when Tom reveals himself to be a log that survives countless adverse events, his coldness is the protective shield against the emotional devastation that surrounds him.
