European Films

The German filmmaking duo of director Stefan Krohmer and screenwriter Daniel Nocke knock it out of the ball park with their stifling drama Sommer ’04 an der Schlei (Summer ’04). Featuring yet more evidence – as if it were necessarily – of the talents of German acting powerhouse Martina Gedeck (Das Leben der Anderen / The Lives of Others), this summertime family drama of the silent-waters-run-deep type is intriguing at first sight and perturbing upon closer inspection. It has already seen healthy returns in Germany and was recently released in the US. More travel would be deserved, thus creating a possibility for even greater exposure of the talents of Krohmer, Nocke and Gedeck.

15-year-old Nils (Lucas Kotaranin) and his sexually precocious 12-year-old girlfriend Livia (Svea Lohde) are spending the holidays with Nils’s parents Mirjam (Gedeck) and André (Peter Davor) in their summer home on the Schlei estuary, near the Baltic Sea and the Danish border. The proudly liberal family is not particularly worried about young Livia’s openly sexual behaviour towards Nils, though Mirjam does get worried when Livia, for whom she is at least nominally responsible, seems to signal she would also be interested in Bill (Robert Seeliger), a self-satisfied German-American neighbour whose teen years are definitely behind him.

What at first might be read as straightforward protectionism of her own child as well as the obvious feeling of responsibility towards her young guest and the girls’ parents soon becomes more complicated when Miriam visits Bill’s isolated farmhouse when Livia goes missing. Despite her anger and traces of despair, she also discovers what might have attracted Livia to Bill in the first place.

As Miriam and Bill fall into a torrid sexual affair if not a relationship of mutual trust and comprehension, the carefully balanced liberal and bourgeois family values that seemed a given gradually disintegrate without anyone ever spending much time to address what is happening, until a sailing accident forces everyone to sober up and face their responsibilities.

In his carefully constructed minimalist screenplay, Nocke prefers a muddy sort of tension over explanation, giving the entire film an undercurrent of unease that is never really resolved. It is never clear what the audience should make of Bill, for example, even after he explains to Miriam how he feels about Livia. All this uncertainty creates a stifling atmosphere that not only reflects the sweltering, overcast summer days on the water, but also amply explains the sometimes irrational acts of the protagonists.

The fact that Krohmer lets everything play out in long takes only seems to make matters worse for the characters, letting them swim and almost drown in the prolonged moments of awkwardness of their own making. Like in Matthias Luthartd’s Pingpong, another recent dissection of a German bourgeois family’s life crashing down, it is the creation of an atmosphere of dread and impending doom that makes for such compelling viewing, as if the result of the disintegration of long upheld values is somehow equivalent to apprehending the killer in a more conventional thriller.

The always reliable Gedeck puts in finely nuanced performance as a woman whose entire frame of reference for her life and values slowly comes apart. She again proves she can elevate good material to greatness with another subtle yet clearly readable take on her character. If Krohmer and Nocke, who are only collaborating on their second feature after Sie haben Knut (They've got Knut), meticulously crafted the world Miriam inhabits, it is Gedeck’s presence that makes it such a tangible mess, which is meant as high praise indeed.

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