Roy

WIf one did not use it better, one could believe that Dietrich Brüggemann shot “Nö” to show off the electorate that the (probable) government has brought us for the next four years. It is a film from that green and yellow milieu that is just about to discover that it has more in common than it previously wanted to admit.

Dina is an actress. Michael is a doctor. Both are in their early 30s, you could imagine them as a Green voter, him as a FDP sympathizer. She wants to commit, he doesn’t think he’s ready for it. She gets along with her parents, he is in permanent clinic with his stinky father. Both move in an urban prosperity bubble. They don’t have any real problems. But they have a lot to chew on.

Even if he didn’t plan it, Dietrich Brüggemann is well on the way to creating a portrait of the generation that fell from the Berlin Wall (West). “Nope” is already part three. In his “Nine Scenes” (2006) the two are called Magdalena and Rudi, and one is in love with the other. Both have just graduated from high school and now have to go into a hostile life, which turns out to be more of a result of fragile constellations between young people, parents, grandparents and potential life partners.

Six years later in “3 rooms / kitchen / bathroom” there are already Dina and Michael. You are part of a clique that meets in a Berlin flat share, and relationships diverge as quickly as they came together. The parents have some shocking revelations for their children. There are a few couples in the end, but no one would bet they will stay that way.

Without a cut

Dina (again: Anna Brüggemann) and Michael (again: Alexander Khuon) stayed together until “Nö”. They are fine. You have a large circle of friends. You continue to go to art exhibitions, as you did at the end of “3 Rooms”. They are well educated, enlightened. Not overly political, but left-wing liberal. And they are in constant stress, because of relationship and self-realization. They have high expectations of life, which they cannot formulate precisely, but they find themselves in the midst of a society of promises that are due to them and that they do not want to miss.

That sounds commonplace. Is commonplace. But Dietrich Brüggemann makes something very special out of it. The Americans would romantic comedy label, but basically they don’t have what Brüggemann developed through three films: the romantic tragicomedy.

Above all, Hollywood shies away from the formal rigor of Brüggemann: “Nope” consists of 15 scenes over a period of eight years, each played through in front of the camera without editing. Most of them are also tableaus in which the camera does not move a millimeter, at most the people in the frame.

Escape through the corridors

The great pillar saint for Brüggemann’s filmmaking is the Swedish director Roy Andersson (“A dove sits on a branch and thinks about life”, with which he won the Golden Lion in Venice), but Brüggemann is not so grotesque and laconic, rather ironic and snappy.

The hospital sequence is a prime example of his stylistic mastery. Anna has just given birth, she and Michael are happy, then the mother-in-law shows up. She brings presents, but Anna realizes that she just wants to suckle herself into the family life to come. She throws them out, but now Anna wants to go home and begins an escape through the corridors. Everywhere in her fear of motherhood she sees the horror faces of a war that lie in wait for her baby, and Brüggemann cuts the two perspectives together, her horror and Michael’s harmless perception.

It is wonderful how many styles and nuances Brüggemann knows how to write and stage and how to combine them under his film hat. Once, in the middle of an operation, Michael broods. The clock on the wall stops, and suddenly the sliced, drugged patient, from whom the intestines are oozing, demands a cigarette. Now the doctor and the operated person begin to talk calmly about the art of living, the young and the experienced. When everything is said, the clock starts ticking again and Michael continues to operate.

Corona vestibule

The Brüggemanns (his sister is a co-author) can be surreal, but also oppressive (if the terminally ill father, played by Hanns Zischler, cannot make a reconciling gesture to his son), they can be satirical (if the gynecologist Dina and Michael paints a horror panorama of parenthood), or political (if the invitees are arbitrarily selected at the entrance to an art installation, like refugees at the gate to the EU) or frightening (like in the self-optimization workshop of the American drama teacher), even wistful (if the son’s cord cutting process is reflected in the rapid run-through of the baby monitor).

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Above all, the scenes are gorgeously pointed, life-wise, concise. Brüggemann also wrote the epoch-making script for the only award ceremony of the last decade that was worth watching, the 2019 European Film Award in Berlin. And Brüggemann was one of the initiators of the #Allesdichtmachen campaign, with which prominent artists satirically positioned themselves against the Corona policy, but in contrast to this, you don’t hear the wrong note in “Nö”.

The action has a curious echo in “Nö”, where the terrible gynecologist Mark Waschke proves to be a vaccination advocate. Vorhall, because the shooting ended at the end of 2018 and the film was then held up by the pandemic. Brüggemann himself has nothing against corona vaccinations (although he refuses them for himself). But he canceled an appearance at the Festival of German Films in Ludwigshafen in September, where only those who had been vaccinated and recovered were allowed in.

He wondered if vaccination could divide humanity into two classes, and his answer was “Nope”. He thinks this is devastating, and he “does not appear in front of an audience that has been pre-sorted according to any biological or other criteria”. The film title actually came about during a phone call Brüggemann made with his producer. Producer: Do you already have a title for your film? Brüggemann: Nope. Producer: Good title.