Great adaptation of Ulla Hahn's even greater biographic novel about a girl growing up in post WWII (West) Germany amidst working class simpletons! In its "greyish" mood, it brings into mind (the earlier playing and admittedly more gruesome) "Angelas Ashes" (deutsch: Die Asche meiner Mutter), more than, for example, the more playful French "The Four Hundred Blows" (F. Truffaut, 1959). Seeing our hero girl suffer in its plain and harsh world and yearning for some light(ness) and tenderness is very touching, indeed. The zeitgeist is neatly visualized. Overall a great cast, really good acting. The three girls playing the growing up Hildegard all do a very fine job at bringing heart into this story. Ulrich Noethen as her father perfectly personifies proletarian fears. And Corinna Harfouch as a freaky voyeur secretary makes it hard to keep a straight face. Two thumbs up! Too bad, much of its language / (Cologne) dialect quality will get lost in translations. Watch it anyway!
2 Reviews
Bland and uninspired with a bad lead performance
Horst_In_Translation21 December 2016
Warning: Spoilers
"Teufelsbraten" or "Das verborgene Wort" or "The Hidden Word" is a German movie from 2007, so this one will have its 10th anniversary next year. It is a small screen release that was shown as a 2-part-film back then and this means that it has a really long runtime, namely slightly under three hours as each of the two episodes comes close to the 90-minute mark. The focus here (and probably also the title reference) is on a girl named Hildegard. She grows up in Germany in the 1950s and her somewhat emancipated approach to life results in all kinds of conflicts and struggles with characters who want to preserve everything the way it has been (and worked?) so far. This also includes her closest family members. The director here is Hermine Huntgeburth, one of Germany's most successful female filmmakers.
The cast includes quite a few names that you will have heard of before if you have an interest in German movies. Hildegard, for example, is played by Anna Fischer during one phase in the film and this is also a bit of a negative deal-breaker for me as I don't think she is talented at all and certainly not capable of pulling off lead performances. There are other cast members that I did not like such as Sebastian Urzendowsky, but luckily he has almost no screen time. A somewhat funny little performance by Harald Schmidt was one of the highlight, but I have always liked him admittedly. Actors with enough talent to elevate the material here do not have enough screen time either to make a difference or their characters are just written too badly. With this I am for example referring to Harfouch and Noethen. I personally thought it was an okay movie early on, but the longer it went the more I lost interest in the story. Sure you can go for the bleak approach in terms of atmosphere, but you still have to get the audience involved then somehow and I do not think the writers succeeded here. This is especially disappointing as it was not just one working on the story here. I have not read the Ulla Hahn novel this film is based on, but I also have no interest from what I saw here. I am not sure if the problems lie in her original work or the adaptation.
As a whole, the film gets even worse in the second half, but like I already said for me personally, from my subjective position this had mostly to do with Fischer being in pretty much every scene then and it was sometimes almost unbearable to watch. I also don't think it was necessary at all to drag this movie so long. There were so so many scenes and moments that felt really unimportant and with no significance for the story and overall outcome that they easily could have (and should have) kept this one movie at 100 minutes max. That way, I may even have recommended the watch if they had included the focus on the right scenes, but this way I just cannot do it. This is not worth watching as a character study, not for the historical context of Germany and sadly also not for the acting. A very underwhelming watch throughout the entire film. That lesbian scene at the end was probably a really desperate attempt to still get audiences to care. I give it a thumbs-down. Watch something else instead.
The cast includes quite a few names that you will have heard of before if you have an interest in German movies. Hildegard, for example, is played by Anna Fischer during one phase in the film and this is also a bit of a negative deal-breaker for me as I don't think she is talented at all and certainly not capable of pulling off lead performances. There are other cast members that I did not like such as Sebastian Urzendowsky, but luckily he has almost no screen time. A somewhat funny little performance by Harald Schmidt was one of the highlight, but I have always liked him admittedly. Actors with enough talent to elevate the material here do not have enough screen time either to make a difference or their characters are just written too badly. With this I am for example referring to Harfouch and Noethen. I personally thought it was an okay movie early on, but the longer it went the more I lost interest in the story. Sure you can go for the bleak approach in terms of atmosphere, but you still have to get the audience involved then somehow and I do not think the writers succeeded here. This is especially disappointing as it was not just one working on the story here. I have not read the Ulla Hahn novel this film is based on, but I also have no interest from what I saw here. I am not sure if the problems lie in her original work or the adaptation.
As a whole, the film gets even worse in the second half, but like I already said for me personally, from my subjective position this had mostly to do with Fischer being in pretty much every scene then and it was sometimes almost unbearable to watch. I also don't think it was necessary at all to drag this movie so long. There were so so many scenes and moments that felt really unimportant and with no significance for the story and overall outcome that they easily could have (and should have) kept this one movie at 100 minutes max. That way, I may even have recommended the watch if they had included the focus on the right scenes, but this way I just cannot do it. This is not worth watching as a character study, not for the historical context of Germany and sadly also not for the acting. A very underwhelming watch throughout the entire film. That lesbian scene at the end was probably a really desperate attempt to still get audiences to care. I give it a thumbs-down. Watch something else instead.
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