The Father Game
Oct 15, 2009 Documentary, Drama
Genre: Drama
A film, three stories: In his new film, the father game based on the novel by Joseph Michael Glawogger Haslinger has a confusing web of actions and characters designed to where it is always the most broken relationships between people. As the title of the film suggests it already, it turns primarily to conflicts between the generations of children with their fathers.
Ratz (Helmut Köpping) is hate A drunken long-term student, the abysmally his father (Christian Tramitz), a successful and ambitious politicians. To act out his revenge fantasies, the Filius a computer game called “Kill Daddy Goodnight” design that allows him to carry the hated father, at least virtually into the next world. In addition, there’s his sister (Franziska Weisz), with which it combines an incestuous relationship. In short. A family to run away. And that’s what the son is doing well at the first opportunity.
The coming unexpectedly, Ratz receives a call from his former college friend Mimi (Sabine Timoteo), who asks him to her the next day in New York besuchen. Pleased with the welcome change is made Ratz into the plane and flies to the U.S.. But what awaits him there is at least as horrible as what he has just left behind: For Mimi and her family to hide his own grandfather (Otto Tausig) for 32 years in the cellar, so that it is not up for a massacre committed during the Second World War Lithuanian Jews must answer for.
And finally there are the journalists Jonas Shtrom (Ulrich Tukur), whose father was among the victims of execution. His son inherited his father contrasted the existing relationship with a very withdrawn retelling of the massacre. It is the last Father of the many relationships that takes up the film and played through – and the bitterest.
It’s an ambiguous film that Michael Glawogger with the filming of the 600 pages thick novel by Joseph Haslinger submitted here. While many see him as a masterpiece, and he was voted in Austria at the best feature film of the year 2009, he is other than completely unsuccessful film. The fact is that Glawogger has hineingepackt into his work much more dense and cryptic. Several parallel narrative strands, their linkage opens up very late and want to still do not really fit into a homogeneous history, countless different themes and different topics such as broken relationships with fathers and other emotions, rare diseases, unpunished criminals and – of course — Nazi era, this animated individuals who enter the real images. That is too much for some viewers – especially the really deadly serious story is broken again and again by a very fierce, a typical Austrian humor.
Within this conglomerate of various elements affect the characters, despite the excellent cast performances never like real people of flesh and blood, but as symbols, such as placeholders in a controlled experiment. And that is exactly Glawogger film too – an experiment in which we are thrown, and we understand its meaning until late. Because here – as in life – just not everything fits together adds, because there are open questions that remain gaps which we are unable to fill.
The Lord’s game is a film that makes the audience hard. To let yourself fall into it simply is not enough. He challenges us, forces us to adopt an attitude. Precisely in this consists primarily in understanding the sometimes extreme reactions, which has produced this film, one of his undeniable qualities. It is not the only one.
(Joachim Kurz)
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After so many films leave you helpless, shaking the cinema. Expectations were set too high? Knowing the brilliant documentary by Michael Glawogger as Megacities (1998) and Working Man’s Death (2005) or his last brilliant film Slumming (2006), then you could really only go in full of anticipation and curiosity in his new feature film. But Glawogger The father play a bitter disappointment.
If you wonder what it actually is, is the answer that yet easy to use. But the question of “Why is it all about?” Is very difficult to answer. The film is based on the eponymous novel by Josef Haslinger. The focus is the Vienna-35-year-old Kramer Ratz (Helmut Köpping) which does not exactly have the best relationship with his father, a minister, and therefore developed a brutal computer game called Kill Daddy Goodnight . At the beginning of the film he gets from his ex Mimi (in ever-changing wigs: Sabine Timoteo, a call) with the request to New York to come and renovate the house of her grandfather (Otto Tausig) to.
In parallel to this plot, we see a certain Jonas Shtrom (Ulrich Tukur), who is seeking the murderer of his father, a Lithuanian Nazi. Yet, this is Mimi’s Nazi grandfather, who holed up in a cellar for 32, is herrichten the Ratz to a homely place to stay. A plot that comes along a bit too zurechtgeschustert and spent two hours moving dangerously thin ice.
Father Hatred is one of the reasons that circulates around the figure of Ratz. But this father-hate computer game, developed by Ratz is ridiculous. A shooter game, where you can earn more points the more, the more father figures to be gunned down. Ratz must also confront the Nazi past of a war criminal. In these difficult issues are mixed bizarre images such as night drive through wild snow, animated computer characters, images of war massacres. Like a shattered puzzle, the film disintegrates more and more, rather than put together piece by piece. And at some point, it is unfortunately only very boring.
(Katrin Knauth)
Title: The father Game Original Title: Kill Daddy Goodnight Country of production: Germany, France, Austria Year of production: 2008 Length: 117 (min) of material: Alamode Film Distribution
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