The Midday Woman: Disappointments and Departures in the Film Adaptation

Barbara Albert reduces Julia Franck’s novel “The Midday Woman” to the conventions of set cinema

For one of the shortest film reviews in history, John Steinbeck only needed six words. When asked for his opinion on the lavish Bible film adaptation “King of Kings,” he wrote in 1927: “Saw the picture; loved the book”.

Even if it’s not appropriate to play film and literature off against each other, because each art form follows its own rules, you’re always faced with Steinbeck’s dilemma. How can it be that filmed literature often fails so tragically? And if it is so difficult to make them into films, why are the content and dramaturgical tricks of even global literary successes so often radically changed? Of course, there are always very happy examples of this. To name just two upcoming cinematic events that thoroughly go against the grain of their originals: Jonathan Glazer’s masterful film adaptation of Martin Amis’ “Area of ​​Interest” and “Poor Things”, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Alasdair Gray adaptation, which has just won an award in Venice. But examples like this are more common.

A production company bought one of the rare German-language world bestsellers for a lot of money, which won the German Book Prize immediately after its publication in 2007, was translated into 37 languages ​​and sold over a million copies worldwide. “The Midday Woman” is the best-known work of its author Julia Franck. And the first thing you do with your story: delete the bang with which it begins.

From the perspective of a seven-year-old, it describes how his mother left him at a train station in the immediate post-war period without saying a word. Anyone who immediately burdens their protagonist with such a moral burden will then have to make a big splash. And in doing so, it also challenges its readers to question their own prejudices, from which expectations are formed. Isn’t something like that also possible in the cinema? Do you have to postpone this scene until the last act? Is director Barbara Albert, one of the most respected auteurs in Austrian cinema, afraid of losing her audience here? Who are we to withdraw our trust from a character so quickly?

Instead, before beginning with her heroine Helene’s childhood in the early 20th century, the filmmaker fast forwards to the end. In the 1950s, Helene visits a relative’s farm to, as we later learn, look for this very child. Unlike in the novel, the traumatized man will not turn his back on her, even when, instead of an apology, she responds to him with a strangely playful request: “Tell me a story.”

Pushed back into the conventions of linearity, the central theme, the discourse about motherhood, is initially pushed aside. The story moves straight towards an episode in Berlin in the 1920s, which is currently experiencing a particular boom in film and television.

Here, Helene and her sister roam Weimar Berlin, where their Jewish aunt throws coked-up artist parties. But the more conventional the material presents itself in dealing with these clichés, the greater the demands on historical and psychological plausibility become. Does the young woman’s first boyfriend really have to be killed by Nazis – unlike in the novel – in order to further orchestrate the stroke of fate? And is it plausible, in shortening the story that flips over long periods of time, that the woman persecuted for being a so-called half-Jewish marries an anti-Semitic Nazi officer because he gives her a false identity?

A story from their time does not develop here; characters are placed as if cut out against historical backgrounds. As in the television series “Babylon Berlin”, designer opulence determines the production design, which has little to do with historical reality (equipment: Felicity Good). The old rule in production design that you should preferably use furniture that is ten years older than your playing time (because you don’t always buy something new) seems of little value in the current 1920s retro wave. The image of Berlin in these films is a kind of exaggerated version of the musical “Cabaret”. You only have to watch the classics of Weimar cinema, films by Gerhard Lamprecht or Georg Wilhelm Pope, to get an accurate picture of how people lived back then. After all, the 20th century, unlike all previous ones, has set itself the best monument. Why is cinematic heritage so little consulted?

The furnishings of the second central setting, the spartan cooperative apartment that Helene moves into with her Nazi husband, seem even more absurd. Instead of the almost obligatory picture of Hitler at the time, there hangs there, gratefully circled by the camera, a brand new and barely affordable Art Deco lamp by the designer Otto Müller. One may find such detailed criticism subtle, but these museum displays draw attention away from what could be the real event in the portrayal of the exquisite Mala Emde – a woman’s self-identification and her resistance to the unchallenged dogmas of motherhood. If a novel can make you think about it, why not a film?

One would like to think of role models like Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman”, but the nervous hand-held camera style (Filip Zumbrunn) does not allow for a similar level of concentration. It almost seems as if a film style that is as close as possible to historical cinema should prevent the possibility of a thoughtful cinema.

One can also ask whether the construction of historicity itself could not be made an issue. At least there are some approaches here in Kyan Bayani’s film music. At one point there is a cleverly alienated techno sound, at another time the shellac record of a Yiddish klezmer song from today is played. But these anachronisms seem more secret than open; there is a lack of self-confidence in dealing with the cinematic clichés of German history. The expectation of the style of representative historical literary adaptations seems too powerful. In the 1970s, at the time of Ken Russell and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, things had already progressed a lot. So in the end the old question remains as to why they didn’t want to at least leave the content and structure of the novel intact.

The lunch lady. D/CH/LUX 2023.

Director: Barbara Albert. 142 min.