LAMORTE
Despite unconvincing moments from a directorial point of view, in many respects Lamorte turned out to be quite courageous and forward-looking, a small gem in the filmography of Xaver Schwarzenberger and of his wife Ulrike.
Film director: Xaver Schwarzenberger
ZUCKEROMA
by Xaver Schwarzenberger grade: 6.5 Xaver Schwarzenberger and his wife Ulrike – author of the screenplay – deliberately leave certain questions open and make a subtle ambiguity an essential element… Read more »
O PALMENBAUM
It’s immediately clear that O Palmenbaum is not an ambitious feature film. Its main purpose is to stage the bizarre adventures of the Treichl/Moor families, which the audience loved so much in Single Bells. And this, considered from this point of view, works, especially if one thinks that, compared to numerous other sequels, the structure of the previous feature film is never taken up, in order to create a sort of “carbon copy” of it.
DINNER FOR TWO
Dinner for two – made for television by Xaver Schwarzenberger, the long-time cinematographer of the great Rainer Werner Fassbinder – aims above all to be a fresco of Viennese society – and, more generally, of the world in which we live – without taking itself too seriously. A long journey through Vienna where anything can happen.
SINGLE BELLS
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 “.
THE PACIFIC OCEAN
With a sophisticated black and white that recalls the cinematography of Katzelmacher (Fassbinder’s first film, 1969), The Pacific Ocean – the first feature by Xaver Schwarzenberger, Fassbinder’s long-time assistant – is a work that, in its own way, has become a milestone in Austrian and German cinema of the 1980s.