Berlin Review: Emily Atef’s “One Day We’ll Tell Each Other Everything”

Emily Atef’s latest film is something of a pastoral, a well-crafted foray into high-end romantic light saddled with uncomfortable baggage about Germany’s post-1989 reunification. The Berlin Film Festival competition entry is distinctly personal to the novel’s author, Daniela Krien, who was born in the former East Germany in the mid-1970s, and features a number of quirky details, such as a nerve-wracking car crash involving what appears to be an orphaned Trabant. But for a film that shows a lot of bare flesh and spends a lot of time documenting a young woman’s complicated sexual awakening, the political table talk can be distracting and even exhausting, especially when an entire (recently reunited) family escapes. in “The Song of the Peat Soldiers”.

The year is 1990 and the young woman in question is 18-year-old Maria (Marlene Burow) who has moved away from her divorced mother to spend time with her boyfriend Johannes (Cedric Eich) on the family farm. She pitches in, but realizes that her heart isn’t really in it (“She’s cute, but farm life isn’t for her,” Johannes’ mother remarks). Instead, it winds through the cornfields, usually pausing to immerse itself in Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov in scenic surroundings. Johannes, on the other hand, lags behind her on the path to enlightenment and buys an expensive camera on a trip to Munich, which he wants to use as a ticket to art school in Leipzig and as a way out of the countryside of Thuringia. .

Although Maria is far from a country person, she doesn’t necessarily want to leave, and where the storyline takes her next is subtly indicated by a fragment of a conversation about the neighbor, Henner (Felix Kramer), and his legendary libido . Their subsequent encounter is upper body stuff: Quieted by Henner’s two snarling guard dogs, Maria allows him to invade her personal space with an intensity that today would be considered indecent assault. Despite this, Maria is hooked and begins an obsessive relationship with Henner, which takes the film to much darker terrain than the warm terrain. PoldarkStyle arrangement seems to indicate this. Their time together is much more Last tango in Paris: secret, silent and just as destructive. (“Now I’ve caught you,” he says with obvious self-consciousness, “and dragged you into my cave.”)

Yet the outside world always creeps in, bringing with it a certain Proustian memory that will be familiar to Germans of a certain age, but doesn’t give much texture to anyone anymore. A grandmother marveling at the invention of canned whipped cream is a beautiful moment, but ironically says a lot more about the characters here than countless conversations about the collapse of the German economy after the fall of the Berlin Wall (“We have ‘ had a longer transition”, says someone). Maria’s past as a member of a communist kindergarten called Young Pioneers also seems to come out of nowhere, but again, that seems like so much hot air in a film that’s a whopping 129 minutes long. Far better are the subtle nods to the new freedoms that await outside Thuringia, as evidenced when Maria and Johannes drive into town, bluntly waving through a police checkpoint as Depeche Mode’s 1987 electropop hit “Behind the Wheel” blares harsh sounds.

The scene itself exudes youthful idealism and a sense of freedom that somehow never develops. There’s not much to be said against the bite of a title, other than a clever, if not exactly believable, cautionary tale about the dangers of mistaking lust for love and falling for the next bit of rudeness.