Wolfgang Ennenbach MFA Alamode Film
A daughter of the desert? Vicky Krieps as Ingeborg Bachmann
Hardly any other relationship has been illuminated as much as the destructive love of Max Frisch and Ingeborg Bachmann. The correspondence between the two writers has now been published, not just the features section, but generations of German scholars are searching through the work of the Austrian and the Swiss for allusions and accusations, references and imitations. Margarethe von Trotta has now dedicated almost two hours of feature film to this shop window love. Significantly, the relationship drama is called “Ingeborg Bachmann” with the addition “Journey to the Desert”. Von Trotta, trained on portraits of women (“Rosa Luxemburg”, 1986; “Hannah Arendt”, 2012), adopts Bachmann’s perspective. And that is one of perpetrator and victim.
He (Ronald Zehrfeld) bangs on the typewriter so vigorously that she (Vicky Krieps) can’t sleep, let alone think. He doesn’t want the flowers that she bought him after he returned from a trip abroad, but rather a “decent dinner.” In fact, he paternalistically calls her “my girl” and either sits at his desk or waits at the set dining table while she washes up or roasts in her apron. The move to Zurich that he forced on her also torments the sensitive woman. She doesn’t want to get used to the weak coffee. “If only there were at least cappuccino,” sighs Bachmann, and in general, everyone would be happier in Rome. Instead, dull Max drives her through the mountains in the Beetle and says: “I could never move away from Switzerland.” Then he does it for her. And his Ingeborg later reproaches him for that too. She speaks of a “Rome before the catastrophe that struck me. I was driven out of this city.” The “catastrophe” is Max. And her “murderer” too, she says.
That’s why the victim has to go on a journey through the desert to recover from all the unreasonable demands, the thin coffee, etc. But in terms of film, this journey is uneventful. It is only the narrative location from which von Trotta repeatedly jumps back to the stages of great love in flashbacks. A sunset in the desert is followed by a walk on Lake Zurich, a visit to an Arabic bar is followed by an argument in Rome, the next desert trip is followed by the next scene of jealousy. Von Trotta frees herself from the obligation to portray the relationship chronologically, but the individual highlights that she sheds on the Frisch-Bachmann struggle do not develop any dynamics. They are disjointed fragments that also require a lot of prior knowledge.
A novel is mentioned here in which the main character pretends to be blind (“My name is Gantenbein”), where she gives a lecture to a male audience wearing dark glasses. It is never made clear that this is about her famous speech on the occasion of the awarding of the War Blind Radio Play Prize. Bachmann’s early death by burning is alluded to several times, presumably caused by a cigarette smoked in bed. She repeatedly lights herself while lying down, and once a candle that was handed to her to light her cigarette falls into her lap. She watches, motionless, as the fire spreads between her legs. People also appear who are not given a name and have to be guessed, including: Hans Magnus Enzensberger and other representatives of Group 47.
Beyond the unexplained references for Bachmann connoisseurs, the film also suffers from its documentary corset. In order not to have to put sentences into the mouths of the two main characters, von Trotta repeatedly reproduces interview scenes, readings and speeches. Even in the dialogue, Max and Ingeborg paraphrase: “you wrote” and “you didn’t say.” Or talk to each other in sentences taken from novels and poems. Taking into account the good will to achieve authenticity and the wonderful formulations that can be heard (for example from Bachmann’s story “Undine goes”), this procedure completely woodenizes the drama. The two main actors can’t change that, even though Vicky Krieps in particular tries hard to imitate Bachmann’s whisper, who was said to have not read her poems but cried. Unfortunately, it is precisely this intensity that the film lacks.
2023-10-22 17:45:00
#Cinema #Shop #Window #Love
