Rating: 3 / 5
TV presenter Lisa Wartberg (Heike Makatsch) is totally engrossed in her work. However, when her mother Maria (Katharina Thalbach) loses her memory after an accident, Katharina ends up on a cruise ship to New York through a strange coincidence. Together with their make-up artist Fred (Michael Ostrowiski) they go in search of their mother and thus also get on the ship, where they also get to know Axel (Moritz Bleibtreu) and his son Florian (Marlon Schramm).
Can you digest music that thematically takes up the same theme of really fantastic love over and over again. That’s probably one of the questions that comes up when you see the screen adaptation of I’ve Never Been to New York. Everything is loud, everything is colorful and no time to digest. Sometimes it’s a question of taste and musicals are a genre anyway, which always walks a fine line between unbelievable babble and seeming truthfulness. So Schlager also has a form of music that you have to like. Although one is easily tempted not to open up to the whole thing anyway, because both the musical form and the genre are very manipulative, if one has the courage to do so, one crosses an inhibition threshold that one never gets close to wanted to. Schlager simply has an incredibly bad reputation in certain circles, even though there may also be musicians in the genre who sing a little more than the usual love song in the mountains.
Trailer for I’ve Never Been to New York
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This is of course colorful and totally exaggerated. And one doubts a bit about the ability of German cinema to stage such an absurd work that needs credibility more than anything else. But as soon as you’ve gotten through the almost endless exposition of the meager characters, which is quite usual for the genre, a ship journey begins, which is staged so absurdly and crazy that it can take your breath away. It doesn’t matter whether it’s far more, ship personnel or sunlight. Everything looks gaudy and oversaturated, as if the camera was calling for help and was about to throw up at any moment. But musicals should be just as exaggerated and so director Philipp Stölzl succeeds in making the unbelievable seem believable and the believable unbelievable. Knowing that none of this can be real, the film throws its viewers from scene to scene, which meanwhile wallows in heartbreak and exultation.
The ensemble is quite well chosen here, although top-class actors and actresses were not necessarily needed for this. Heike Makatsch as a revised television moderator succeeds in the really shallowly written transformation from workhorse to lover within the story. Moritz Bleibtreu, on the other hand, sometimes seems like the weakest link within the constellation, although he is by no means overwhelmed in terms of acting with the material and his character development, but clearly with one or the other vocal interlude. He conveys the feeling of being able to sing halfway, but stinks in direct comparison to the rest of the cast. Uwe Ochsenknecht as a gigolo, who goes on board the ship to maybe become a little more independent financially, is a great pleasure. Although it is a typical portrayal of the man who is already in The Wild Things (2003) wasn’t too bad for anything, on the other hand Ochsenkencht can convey such characters well and I’ve never been to New York either, his character seems completely overdrawn, just like the rest.
The musical interludes, on the other hand, do not always seem perfectly coordinated, after which it takes a long time before a song is even warbled and then there are breaks. However, Stölzl does not always seem to use the breaks here for really important things. So you might say that the character development could be pushed forward. But since the musical only draws template-like, almost one-dimensional characters anyway, boredom is much more likely to arise in these moments. Although the director manages to do one or two tracking shots over the oversaturated backdrop, after a few repetitions you quickly get fed up with it. On the other hand, the design in the overall concept works very well, because the backdrops and everything look so exaggerated and dreamlike that a surreal and fairytale feeling opens up in the viewer, which will certainly give great pleasure to one and the other because of the exaggerated presentation puts a smile on your face.
It is also interesting that the film outlines a social spectrum. From the upper class to the lower class, everything is represented here. But this work doesn’t want to be political, even if it can’t be deleted entirely, of course. So there is also a song that is a bit like the workers’ song Dumbo (1941) recalled. But if you put the thought aside, you can have a lot of fun with the film.
You really have to wear everything I have never been to New York like to have a smooth experience. But sometimes you can’t like everything about the work because it might be too flat musically, because it’s too colorful and so on and so forth. In essence, however, the film hits the nerve it wants to hit, also with regard to the ambitious staging and the star ensemble. Not all actors are always convincing, while Uwe Ochsenknecht and Katharina Thalbach can be really amusing. The same applies to the work and so it finally overcomes you
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