Alma & Oskar (2022) by Dieter Berner - Review

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by Dieter Berner

grade: 7.5

Alma & Oskar is not only the genesis of some of the most important paintings of the last century. Alma & Oskar is passion, desire, anger. A feature film that is extremely refined in its staging and is inspired by what has been made overseas, while showing its own, marked personality. At the Diagonale’23.

Love. Hate. Art.

Throughout his long and prolific career, director Dieter Berner has often been interested in important personalities from the art world and, in particular, painting. Personalities closely linked to the history of Austria and Vienna that have had and continue to have great resonance throughout the world. This was the case, for example, for the famous painter Egon Schiele, whose life was recounted by Berner in the feature film Egon Schiele: Death and the Maiden (2016), in which we also had the opportunity to observe the artist in his private life. And so, a good six years later, Alma & Oskar (presented as part of the programme of the Diagonale’23), in which the director devoted himself to the life of Oskar Kokoschka and, specifically, to his turbulent relationship with Alma Mahler, the widow of the composer Gustav Mahler, arrived in theatres.

Alma & Oskar, therefore, kicks off just before Gustav Mahler’s death. His wife Alma (played by Emily Cox) is still young and very beautiful and strongly desires to live her life to the fullest, cultivating her passion for music (often put aside precisely because of her husband’s work) and even having affairs with younger men. Following Mahler’s death, it is Oskar Kokoschka’s (Valentin Postlmayr) job to create his death mask. A great passion immediately arises between the artist and his widow. Yet, their love story will not be one of the easiest.

In Alma & Oskar, therefore, Dieter Berner focuses mainly on their relationship, on how it has evolved over the years, on how art plays a fundamental role when it comes to rendering desires and feelings at their best, on how the talent of an artist is able to make immortal a relationship that was inevitably destined to end too soon. Some of Oskar Kokoschka’s fundamental works return again and again in Alma & Oskar and are sometimes worth more than a thousand words, allowing the protagonists themselves to understand realities and situations that would otherwise remain unresolved.

People first, then artists, at any rate. And in his Alma & Oskar, Dieter Berner wanted first of all to put the complex and by no means simple personalities of Alma Mahler and Oskar Kokoschka in the foreground. His insane jealousy, her betrayals, but also moments of tenderness in Semmering and the dream of one day having a family of their own, are the absolute protagonists here and make this important feature by Berner full of pathos and unexpected twists. Alma & Oskar is not only the genesis of some of the most important paintings of the last century. Alma & Oskar is passion, desire, anger. A feature film that is extremely refined in its staging and that draws inspiration from what has been realised overseas, while showing its own, marked personality.