Home for the Weekend (I) (2012) User Reviews

Remains

[kosmasp · 6/10 · 10 August 2013]

What does remain? The German title of the movie translated, a movie that was quite successful in Germany in 2012. A reason they played it at the Berlin International Festival, for those who didn't have a chance to watch it. A powerful movie about a family, that doesn't seem that extraordinary. And of course it wouldn't be a good movie, if everything was just peachy.

The acting is phenomenal, especially the parents are really good and well known in Germany too. There is some added drama that seems a bit unnecessary, but the movie does its best to stay away from clichés as much as possible. It does succeed mostly. A drama well worth watching, if you like those that is

Inside the family

[anthonydavis26 · 5/10 · 26 October 2012]

* Contains spoilers *

This review was written after a screening at Cambridge Film Festival (UK) in September 2012 and for the festival

Home for the Weekend (2012) (originally Was Bleibt) is not, for me, a film that bears comparison with Woody Allen's Interiors, shot just before Manhattan. In the introduction, we were told that films do not often show the lives of the German upper middle-classes, and, although this film may do so, it does not, largely, do so in a novel way, as if what it shows were, in itself, enough.

Allen's film, too, has a mother with a history of mental ill-health and siblings gathering at the family home, one of whom is more put upon by being local, but the highly-strung mother in his family has not simply stopped taking medication as Gitte has - which just seems forced in reinforcing the pat belief that the only problems are when people are not 'compliant'. What, more importantly, is very unsympathetic is the language, typified by talking about Gitte going nuts, whereas my fantasy about Germany is that there is far more acceptance, not least within this class, of mental-health issues and how to support those with them than in Britain.

In this film, for all that the characters just react badly to the news that Gitte stopped her medication, none of them seems either to appreciate her not wanting to be drugged so that she has no feeling, or that their concern at what she has done lacks any obvious meaning if they then go on to reveal that they have just been humouring her. She already feels that they have been pretending, and that she has no important say in anything, but it makes little sense to confirm it at this time.

We see the brothers angry and physical with each other over who is to blame for their mother, but they ultimately move on quite quickly to fulfil themselves away from home, which, sadly, seems to send the message that Gitte had been holding them back, and she is remembered largely as a source of recrimination between father and son. Allen's three sisters seem a little less slow to forget...

Eventually unfulfilling

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 14 January 2017]

"Was bleibt" or "Home for the Weekend" is a German full feature film from 2012, so this one has its 5th anniversary this year. The director here is Hans-Christian Schmid and as a pretty rare occurrence he is not the writer this time. The writer of these 85 minutes is Bernd Lange and he has worked with Schmid for a long time of course, so it's nothing too new really as he has been Schmid's co-writer on several occasions. The cast includes a couple familiar faces for German film buffs like Lars Eidinger and Corinna Harfouch, probably the most known ones. Two sons reunite with their parents on the occasion of celebrating their father's retirement and more secrets get revealed. Their mother has stopped taking their pills, which is apparently one of the core plot themes of the film, but I cannot say I was too convinced by it sadly. There are other fairly dramatic developments as well, for example involving another romantic relationship involving the father. But of course, the sons also get their fair share. I think this film had some good moments overall and I cannot really say why it felt to me that it did not work out really convincingly overall, especially as I liked most of Schmid's other stuff that I have seen. I guess one reason may be Eidinger. I don't think he is a bad actor, but he has a tendency to give extremely similar performances in all his movies and I just don't feel that he can really lose himself in a role, but always sort of delivers the same routine. The consequence is that he really needs the perfect character for him to truly make an impact instead of adapting himself to fit each character. On a more positive note, I found Ernst Stötzner really good and he was surely deserving of his German Film Award nomination. He'd also have made an okay winner that year. They surely went for the wrong choice by choosing the old Gwisdek, even if I loved "A Coffee in Berlin". But back to this movie here. Sometimes it feels that the filmmaker somehow realized himself halfway into the movie that it was pretty slow, dragging and not really too interesting as the second half of the film is suddenly packed with one spectacular thing happening after the next. But this is just as bad as the first half, only for exactly the opposite reasons. A mix between the two would have been great. And maybe a better lead actor and also somebody other than the forgettable Zimmler for one of the major supporting characters. The way, it turned out eventually I cannot recommend seeing it. Thumbs down.