The film is done well and gets quite nightmarish. But I think, the ambience is a bit too smooth and artificial to take it seriously. Murder: By Reason of Insanity, has a much creepier feeling to it, because the setting is much more realistic. But what the heck: Günther is the kind of psychopath, that Jürgen plays so well. And such a nice, good looking chap by the outward appearance!
AAAUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!
GOD i hated this movie!!!
AAAUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!
I hope next time Prochnow runs over somebody with a car, it's whoever is responsible for this LOATHSOME film.
AAAUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!
I hope he lines up the writer, the producer, the director, the hair stylist, the costumer, and especially the SET DESIGNER of this piece of DRECK and zaps them all with a STUN GUN until they can't even feel the #$%! DROOL running down their chins.
AAAUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!
You know... I considered waiting until tomorrow to try to review this movie, so I could cool off and maybe be a little more objective about it. But on second thought I think I will wait till tomorrow simply because that will give me time to think of more nasty things to say about it than I can think of right now.
And you can never say enough nasty things about FESSELN. If Prochnow ever had a starring role - a starring role, mind you - in a movie more despicable than this, somebody please tell me now so I can get that one out of the way too and maybe enjoy the rest of my life.
AAAUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!
Ok I'm done.
Well, I don't know but there was this movie where he was on a sub, but they were all talking funny and I could never figure out what they were saying and there were words on the screen but they didn't make any sense because it sure didn't sound like what they were saying. Anyway, it was kind of dull except for one guy who kept running around hollering, "Alaaaarrrrrrmmmmmm!" every time somebody farted. Oh and Rutger Prochnov dies at the end, or maybe he falls asleep, but anyway... oh, I hope I didn't mess up the ending on you if you haven't seen it.
So, you're saying you didn't like this film???
So what exactly are you trying to say about this film?
What I'm trying to say is:
AAAUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!
Okay, could be a personal problem. Or two or three.
First up, one of my hundreds of thousands of pet peeves is productions with zero visual interest to them. Why would anybody do a thing like that? FESSELN is the cinematic equivalent of the last N.Y. Metropolitan opera I went to - which was the reason I stopped going - in which they had the best possible cast in a four-hour work in which everything was done on vast, bleak set in shades of gray, with a little white and black thrown in for excitement. Mercifully being released from this optical hell for intermission and seriously considering not going back for the second half - with Ferruccio Furlanetto and Frederica von Stade in it! - is still one of my favorite memories. (I decided that surely they wouldn't keep that up for another two hours, and went back. I needn't tell you the punchline.)
Hey, I love a good black-and-white movie as much as anybody. But not when it's supposed to be in color. Real black-and-white movies are designed to look GOOD in black-and-white; the people who make them generally see to it that the scenes are beautiful without color. It's an art form.
FESSELN, however, gives you nothing except one brief scene in a spectacular forest. Otherwise, almost all of it takes place in a hospital (white) and Günther & Hanna's home (all white) and just starves you for anything to look at other than the actors (who were dressed in black & white) and their dog (black and white - they couldn't get a nice red setter??).
Ptooey!
If you're going to give people nothing to look at but the actors and their dog for two hours, you'd better make those actors and their dog damned fascinating.
Let's deal with the dog first and then never speak of it again. Most likely there was some reason for the presence of this animal which escaped me, being unable to follow the dialog. However, not being able to follow the dialog I made up one and a half reasons of my own for its existence:
1. At the beginning of the movie, Jürgen comes in the house with a new toy - a stun gun - and comes THIS close to testing it on the dog. He gets interrupted by the entrance of his wife, Hanna, so at least we are spared seeing him torture a dog out of scientific curiosity. However, just seeing him LOOK at an unsuspecting dog with that instrument in his hand was almost enough to make me turn the movie off then and there... just having seen DIE WILDNIS and all. However, what with his not actually seeing the act through I decided to go ahead and stick the film out. And well before it was over, I was sorry he hadn't zapped that dog and totally eliminated it from the proceedings, because...
1½: Whenever the dog appears after that, it's there simply to get in the way, barking and jumping around to enhance the excitement of the story, which was as annoying to me as it was to Jürgen. He spends a lot of time grabbing it by the collar and dragging it out of the room. But not hard enough, or far enough. The dog keeps finding its way back into the picture.
Next biggest gripe, next to the bleakness of the visual component: the bleakness of the visual component of Jürgen. When there's nothing to look at but the actors, could you make the actors look better than that, pleeeez? Oh, it wasn't Jürgen, who was all beautiful and everything... just like he was in THE MAN INSIDE in disguise as Franz Messer, with those rather dull business clothes and that god-awful slicked-back hair. And did I once say that if you don't know how to work with real colors please just dress him in black and leave it alone? Me and my big mouth. I didn't really mean to dress him in black and leave him alone for an hour and a half, not after taking his hair right out of the party and standing him in front of NOTHING in almost EVERY SCENE. Ah, bozhe moi!!
I took photos from the movie. I would say it was one of the most mind-numbing experiences of the year, only the aggravation kept my synapses alive... because it's one of thoses movies where they just can't bear to linger on anybody for a half a blasted second. Show him! Show her! Show the dog! Show the stun gun! Show him! Oops - he's darn near got an expression set on his face, so quick, cut away to something else!
How they managed to pull this off when so much of the movie is Jürgen staring after someone who's just walked away from him, I don't know. Neat trick, which I never want to see anyone else do.
Not that there weren't any closeups, or even extended closeups. There were lots of them. Mostly in shadow.
As for the MOVIE movie, again, this must be better when you can follow the dialog. But I had a writeup on the story, which I read in advance. The basic idea is that Jürgen's a nasty husband who loves his wife, who loves somebody else (and I hated that ho-boy, incidentally)... so Jürgen isolates Hanna and attempts to win her love back. Then she has an accident and becomes paralyzed; manages to keep in touch with her lover; and Jürgen goes nuts and really abuses her. He beats up his paralyzed wife, rips the phone out of the wall, locks her in the bedroom and force-feeds sleeping pills to her to stop her from trying to escape.
By the time it got like that, I was on his side. Hey Jürgen, next time you drag a woman like that around on the floor, don't grab her by the arm. She was blessed with that long blonde hair for a reason.
I couldn't figure either one of these people out, really. I was seriously considering razzing Jürgen for his schizo performance, even though it couldn't have been his fault with that script... whatever it said. Katharina Böhm, as Hanna, was doing exactly the same thing, only maybe worse. And they're both GOOD actors. Everybody in this movie was GOOD. But Jürgen got a character who, unlike Berwid from MBROI, is not psychotic; Günther just finds it real easy to be real mean. Then he turns around and is sweet as pie, till he gets mad again. Ordinarily you figure anybody possessive enough to physically abuse his partner doesn't really love her - it's purely a matter of power and control. Ownership. Looked like ownership. Smelled like ownership. Quacked like ownership. But when he gets nice from time to time, you expect Ineffectual Nice. Nice that wants to be nice - at the moment - but can't find its feet.
Not here. There were a couple of scenes that came across that way, but mostly, when he was behaving like he loved her, he LOVED her. So... he pushes her around like a bastard, does all he can to deprive her of all independence, and patiently and lovingly helps her with her physical therapy so she can walk again. Huh?? You'd think having her up and around on her own again is the last thing he'd want. He knows darn well she is NOT going to give up Ho-boy. He deals with it by imprisoning her; he makes love to her against her will (and she makes no secret that it's against her will)... and then cries over her photograph because she doesn't love him. I could buy into that if he seemed to have no capacity for real positive feelings, but when he's being a good boy he really does treat her like a human being. For which reason you'd think he would either make a PROPER attempt to win back her love, or be civilized and let her go. When the love looks that genuine, the wife-battering schtick just doesn't work for me. He's not quite as self-absorbed and inherently cruel as he needs to be for that kind of relationship.
Oh yeah, but I forgot - they set that up with the almost-torturing-the-dog bit in the beginning. Silly me.
She, in the meantime, sometimes loves and sometimes hates him. The thing that got me there was the early scene where he's trying to entertain and charm her with a goofy magic-trick routine. Against all reason, it seems to work. (Ok, he looked silly but it WAS cute... more so, probably, if you'd been isolated in a mountain cabin with no other company and nothing else to do.) But dammit, Hanna didn't look like she was just playing along, smiling and appearing to soften up only to put him off guard. She looked like she really, truly, was quite starting to like him again.
Next thing you know, he's leading her on a rough hike through mountainous woods, charging ahead angrily while she screams at him repeatedly to slow down (I don't know German, but I know "NOT SO FAST!" when I hear it.) He couldn't care less. This is clearly no romantic stroll for bonding purposes. He's just testing her mettle, apparently. Then she has a nasty fall, and he is absolutely devastated by her accident. Totally cut up over it - and this was no act to impress somebody with his husbandly concern; there was no one else around. Not even Hanna, who was unconscious and didn't see his reaction.
Huh...? Why...? Wha...?
Then Jürgen ends up eliminating Ho-boy with the stun gun, and you don't get to see it. I had to assume that he put the guy out of commission and then most likely killed him. You never see Ho-boy again, anyway, but what did Jürgen do with the body?
Superior performances from Jürgen and Katharina, (and the supporting players, for that matter) but what a pile-O-poo-poo!
Even the good parts didn't make up for it. The good parts were right at the end, where they try to make up for not letting you watch Ho-boy get fried by letting you watch Jürgen get fried - in slow motion, even. Hanna, who can walk on her own by now (with difficulty) finally gets her mittens on that stun gun. Then she gets in the car and revs up. By the time she's hauled her butt into the car, Jürgen has stumbled out to the garage where he pulls the door down and stands in front of it to stop her from leaving.
Hanna squashes him. Then she gets out of the car and he, pinned up against the garage door and draped over the hood of the vehicle, holds her hand one last time before breathing his last.
Huh??
And actually, neither the zapping nor the squashing was the best part of the movie. The best part was in between, where Jürgen drags himself up off the floor and staggers through the house after Hanna. It was a real treat to watch him do that. I don't know why.
So was watching him beat the snot out of his slutty wife, who was persistently and determinedly unfaithful... with a not-quite-Chippendale poster boy, no less, who ain't gonna have one thing going for him after he loses what's left of his stud monkey youth. HELLO... ANYBODY HOME?
And I liked watching Jürgen pummel that punching bag, a memory which made me smile later when he used the very same fine technique on Hanna.
That was the only smile I got out of this film.
AAAUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!
Good god, what a reaction!! It must be, because you saw Wildnis just before. I would have thought, that this kind of middling film wouldn't warrant an outbreak in any direction! Somebody, who can deal with DNA or The Wickerman should be tougher than this!
It was mainly the look of the thing. The movie is probably a "3", really, but I can't stand just to sit and stare at something as stark as that. Fine at first, and then it gets to a point where you're mostly looking at Jürgen brooding in front of a blank wall. (And did they have to show him racing her to the phone three times? WE GOT THE POINT ALREADY!)
I'll certainly watch it again sometime - I always watch everything again - but not for a long time. Made my eyes tired, and I did not enjoy going through the photos at all, except in the beginning where he was disheveled. That's always a good look for him!