The working-class struggle, the need to ‘grow up’, but also – and above all – love torments are the absolute protagonists in Taking it Back. Andreas Schmied, who has always had a great aptitude for entertaining comedies, has attempted a mix of social discourse and sentimental aspects, paying more attention to the latter.
Der Schutzengel stands out immediately for its evocative noir atmospheres, for places almost isolated from the rest of the world and for an intelligent and never predictable reflection on the nature of human beings. Götz Spielmann’s unmistakable approach did the rest. At the Diagonale’22.
Dealing with love – and, above all, understanding its true meaning – is not at all easy for Charlie and her friends. The same applies to eroticism, which they consider almost an antidote against boredom, but which, in fact, pervades the entire Beautiful Girl with a pulsating, implicit tension.
In Murer: Anatomy of a Trial, Christian Frosch, in staging the trial of the Nazi criminal Franz Murer with a composed and rightly balanced direction, openly points the finger at his own nation and at Austrian society of yesterday and today.
Drawing heavily on what has been made in the past, Andreas Prochaska, with Dead in 3 Days, has made one of his few feature films for the big screen, while showing clear evidence of his long career in television, in a very weak work, with an unsatisfactory script.