wWhen a dog named Alaska gets lost in a German forest, sometimes it takes a special search team to bring him back.
A Buddhist monk taking a break from walking meditation is definitely recommended in that case, especially since more may come of it. For example the love of a lifetime. In the film “What you can see from here” by Aron Lehmann, the Buddhist monk Frederik is from Japan, but actually from Hesse.
So he has to take a considerable detour to meet Luise, who first of all relies on him through a small act of generosity. She smiles only slightly when Frederik quickly eats a piece of chocolate when the rest of the group of Buddhist monks who have stayed in the contemplation house in a village in the Westerwald are nowhere near him. Strengthened by the sweet snack, Frederik can play his part to bring Alaska home.
Hers is that inner peace attributed to Buddhist monks and which works particularly well on a woman accustomed to chaos. Because Luise (Luna Wedler) has a special gift, if we want to talk about a gift in this case: she must always be honest, otherwise something will fall somewhere. Not even one of the many courteous insincerities, without which it is hardly possible in everyday life, goes down with her without falling marks or rattling dishes on the floor.
There are a lot of strange things about the place where What You Can See From Here is set. This has to do with the genre to which the film belongs, as well as the book of the same name by Mariana Leky, which is the basis of the film. In areas of literature where the eyebrows are higher, one would speak of magical realism, but it doesn’t really fit here, because the quirks are clearly too much sought after for that.
“What you can see from here” is dedicated to the big issues of life in a way that transforms the word everyday exotic into its opposite. The everyday is bearable because you don’t find it amazing by itself, but you embellish it with all sorts of exotic ideas. For the great themes of life: love!, death! – Mariana Leky has all sorts of unusual things that make it possible to fix them – and thus draw a dizzying arc around the big topics, which she should nevertheless bring to the goal, namely right in the middle of these topics. In “What You Can See From Here” the central focus of these exotic ideas is the okapi, a “sneaky” jungle animal that haunts Selma’s dreams as an oracle of death in the Westerwald.
Selma is Luise’s grandmother, she has a demiurgic function in the small world of the story: “Selma invented the world.” The world stands on fragile ground, as we know, for example, from Georg Büchner’s “Woyzeck”. Selma once crossed such a floor, but her elbows locked as she carried a duck from the oven to the table. Since then, there’s been a circle painted red in her room, warning of the thin board it’s best not to step on.
