In Falling, Barbara Albert, in staging a strong nostalgia for the past, together with the desire to find oneself and one’s affections, skilfully avoids excessive emotionalism, showing a necessary detachment and a mature rationality in observing the five protagonists closely. Detachment and rationality that, in this case, manage to make us gradually get more and more connected with each individual character.
It is bodies dancing lightly and finally free, as well as close-ups of suffering faces or teenage girls attending a swimming lesson that characterise Talea. And Katharina Mückstein’s camera knows perfectly well how to characterise them, making them, on screen, incredibly alive and pulsating.
There really is a lot to be enjoyed in dealing with all the numerous ideas that the life of this brilliant artist has to offer us. All depends on knowing how to handle them well, in order to make a never predictable or didactic work that is able to portray one of Austria’s most important artistic personalities as passionately and faithfully as possible. And Dieter Berner has perfectly succeeded in this never easy and by no means banal task with his Egon Schiele: Death and the Maiden.
Although it presents quite a few problems, Single Bells – directed by Xaver Schwarzenberger in 1997 and co-produced by Austria and Germany – skilfully avoids all the rhetoric and cheap feel-goodism into which situations of this kind can easily fall. And it also does so without being afraid to “play dirty “.
With a good touch of irony and just as a strong criticism of the National Health Service (and others), Wolfgang Murnberger’s Come Sweet Death sees its protagonist – played by comedian Josef Hader – as a sort of unintentional hero, an apparently bored man who does nothing but turn to alcohol and smoking to forget his loneliness. The director, on the other hand, does not hesitate to show us the worst of society without sparing us anything.
Sunspots (the last short film before Barbara Albert’s debut into the world of full-length films, made in 1998), while presenting a decidedly experimental approach, is strikingly reminiscent of Nordrand, the debut film by the Viennese director, actress and film producer, directed the following year.
With Northern Skirts, Barbara Albert told dramatic and extraordinarily joyful stories, probably thanks to her own 29-year-old youthfulness, and managed to establish herself on the international film scene.