lchadbou-326-26592 Review of Sehnsucht

Sehnsucht (2006)

Low Key Triangle Drama With Several Unusual Aspects

[6/10 · 13 October 2015]

Sehnsucht (Longing) is an interesting variation on the clichéd triangle romance, as its (female) writer-director stresses, for the most part, a grounding in the banal day-to-day realism of a small town. The movie is centered on the young husband, Markus, who we see doing his bit as a volunteer for the fire brigade and at his job as a metal worker focusing on locks. He seems happy with his wife (who is aggressive about how much she wants him) and son, but in the course of a brigade trip to another small town meets a waitress in a pub and suddenly wakes up in her bed, not sure what he's gotten into. Director Grisebach employs either rather close shots of the participants, often in steamy passion, or longer shots where we are distanced, which then take us out of the story aspect and let us look more at the surroundings. She has used some of the townspeople in the Brandenburg villages where it was shot to add a non-professional documentary dimension to the presentation. At several points though there are sudden,jolting lurches into melodrama such as when the waitress falls off her balcony after Markus has told her he wants to break up; or when Markus, who we see then back at work, tries to kill himself. The movie's highpoint is the charming epilogue in which a group of local children share the story of what we have just been through, try to understand it from their point of view, and leave us guessing as to what its resolution will be. If Grisebach, who has directed only one other feature, is not quite up there with Ida Lupino, who made a similar film, The Bigamist, about a man sharing two women, she shows at least with this scene that she has a talent to keep in mind for the future