Fabian: Going to the Dogs
The opening says it all: a tracking shot of a modern subway station cuts seamlessly to the same subway in 1931 Berlin, right in the middle of an election campaign.
The political environment is somewhat in the background, but not ignored. It flares up to the surface at times, but it’s always there, creating fear and loathing of the future. Perhaps forcing the characters to choose different paths, it’s all going to the dogs, the risk is much higher.
The main focus is still on the romance (and eventual separation) between our lonely protagonist copywriter, and a lawyer cum actress in the making. They are very much in love, but they have no money, she will choose a sadder path of “befriending” a know director for a shot at a career in showbiz.
Our protagonist takes this in a mature way, but when his friend kills himself after being dumped by his future wife, and getting a rejection letter from the university (which turned out to be a prank, politically motivated), he basically breaks down and gets back home to his loving mother.
After some healing, the mother encourages him to get back to her love. He’s going to the date, when he sees a boy jumping into a local river for fun, and thinks he will die, so he jumps into the river while not knowing how to swim and drowns. The end, slamming the door on your face after 3 hours of story. Harsh.
This is stylistically similar Marie Antoinette without the anachronisms, very fast paced, handheld cameras, very stylish.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.