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.
Divided into three episodes, Antares is a complex and layered fresco of contemporary society. Three stories, three different lifestyles, one setting. Antares does not only tell us about impossible loves, desperate loves, tormented loves and secret love affairs. Antares stages Love as utopia, a constant, desperate need for love that often also leads to a deep sense of loneliness.
Everything is floating in a timeless dimension in Vergiss Sneider!, Götz Spielmann’s medium-length graduation film. And next to a dark humour in the background, next to a subtle as well as vibrant eroticism, next to characters whose obsessions are taken to the extreme, we see a theatrical mise-en-scène that clearly refers to the Theatre of the Absurd, without forgetting Roman Polanski himself or even the science fiction films of the glorious Hollywood of the 1950s and 1960s.
There is apparently no way of salvation for the protagonists of Götz Spielmann’s Revanche (as in any other work by the Austrian director). This implicit cosmic pessimism – filled, in its own way, with a subtle religiousness – assumes immediately a universal connotation concerning every historical period.