#TIFF18 #Review: In My Room by Ulrich Köhler

Jump to a hybrid doc/fictional newsroom scene, again only a few minutes long, where cameraman Armin (Hans Löw, you know him from TONI ERDMANN) argues with colleagues over said useless footage he took. Lots of media references permeate the rest of the film: the making or watching of TV; the search for appropriate mood playlists for having sex or dying; a date in a derelict video store; crying over old films on a laptop. Media as our reprieve, respite, distraction, emotional trigger. Ironically or tellingly, for a news journalist, Armin never turns to any device to look for solutions to his pending dilemma.

Jump to Armin in a short VICTORIA-like strobe-y Berlin club scene, where the exasperated and not-so-young slacker journalist half-heartedly and ultimately unsuccessfully goes for a girl. Soon he drives to his middle German hometown for a family emergency, only to find himself in bleak-to-absurd but familiar conversations with his father, the father's new lover, plus a non-encounter with Armin's mother.

So far so Berlin School in fast forward mode, potentially tedious --depressingly blah relationships, dysfunctional family life, the ennui of the privileged creative class-- were it not for the dramaturgical pace, condensed story-telling, inner drama, flickering sound, and versatile and light-dark camerawork.

Then the world ends. Armin's grandma dies, he falls asleep, and the next day humanity is gone. This initial revelation comes in a 28 DAYS LATER-like scene of mysterious post-accident tableaus –a stringent allegory of a single death as the eradication of all human life. No explanation, no nuclear incident, no zombies, no virus, no questions being asked (not that there is anyone to ask). Left with his grandmother's corpse and only animals roaming around --dogs, wild boars, horses, chickens, cows and goats inhabit the rest of the film-- Armin overcomes the first shock and bewilderment and hits the road in what becomes a delirious embrace of the new-found freedom of nothing-left-to-lose.

After yet another two-minute accelerated game-style dashboard cam joyride, he stops the abandoned police car he has hijacked in the German-Italian Alps and squads a farm, exhausted but freshly determined to make it. Hans Löw's arching range --beautifully lost, sad, desperate, irritated, mean, searching, stunned, confused, freaking out, crazy, defiant, crafty, tentative, tender, shy, wild, gutsy-- makes it possible that the viewer is buying any of this, although his character is more interesting and entertaining when torn than when getting himself together.

Two thirds in, another surprise: There is another survivor, a young Italian woman called Kirsi (Elena Radonicich), who will come to challenge Armin’s masculinity as well as her femininity, and with it their survival. Armin and Kirsi stay together, out of necessity at first, but he is soon enamoured, talking about a future and about having children. (Compare this to an earlier scene where dad says, wait till you have kids, and Armin replies, that will never happen.) By now Armin is a buff go-getting cowboy/self-sufficient farmer, a whiff of utopian rural Arts and Crafts Movement in the air.

The three acts necessitate one another. The first would be merely standard-issue Berlin School of Gringo Problems if it wasn’t for the coming, literally existential twists and turns. The second act strips away everything, all social context and expectation and throws Armin back to the basics, mainly onto himself --but is a challenge to realize engagingly on screen, without dialogue. Finally, the introduction of a pas de deux, the glorious chance of a relationship. You might roll your eyes at the conventionality of Armin’s new dream --not too far from his dad’s: home, living, good sex, comfort-- but leave that to Kirsi.

Often overlooked is Köhler's sense of humour, delivered en passant with minimal dialogue, as awkwardly existentialist as, but more covert than, the humour Köhler's partner Maren Ade employs. No TONI ERDMANN false teeth jokes here, or rather in a very different context. Overall, there's an astounding level of attention to physicality and hygiene and preening. Peeing, washing, removing dentures, saving condoms. Everyday life, banality, we can all relate to Armin. One quick exchange, while the patchwork family is eating borscht as a quirky example: "It's pronounced 'borsch'. Without a t. And without meat." Köhler has moved on before you can giggle at the unintentional silliness of Armin's world-splaining stepmother, perfectly encapsulating the German petite bourgeoisie trying to be alternative as well as worldly wise. And later this absurd exchange between Armin and Kirsi: "Why are you doing this?" she asks as he putters with the generator. "I want to be independent." --"What do you mean? We are the last men." Kirsi, enigmatic and not entirely revealed to the viewer (and perhaps a bit short-changed in the film), confronts Armin's new, more demanding masculinity. Also part of Köhler's tongue-in-cheek repertoire is a reference that will be lost on most international viewers: Armin is the quintessential German hero, the Germanic prince trained warrior by the Romans, who cunningly came back at them, defeated and pushed them back over the Rhine, to Caesar's big chagrin. All that happened in the year 9AD only yards away from our Armin's hometown.

Many people I talked to about the film perceived it as two-in-one, liking one part more than the other, the Berlin School flavour of the first third or the following post-apocalypse. Which part you favour depends on how you read the film, or perhaps whether you are a half glass full or half empty person. In the credits, Köhler tellingly denotes the first part as "Winter," the second as "Summer." There are numerous mirror scenes that bridge both parts --a first date with a woman in Berlin, then with Kirsi; dancing in a club, dancing in the headlights of Kirsi's RV (one of my favourite scenes, more on that here). Situations, circumstances, and opportunities remain the same, how you interpret them within your life might change. The same applies to the viewer: What is reality or fantasy. What is a beginning, what is an end. What is important, what remains. What --if anything-- changes in the face of extreme disruption.

IN MY ROOM is in its best moments tender and empathic, though sometimes a bit unapproachable and perhaps too on the surface. The film does not shine as brightly and warmly and deeply as Valeska Grisebach's brilliant WESTERN last year (she is an Ade-Köhler collaborator), which it keeps reminding me of. Less subtly, questioningly male than WESTERN’s working-class anti-hero Meinhard, less complexly interrelated with the world. Alas, that is part of the film’s point, so should not necessarily be registered as a criticism.

We have seen chaos sneak in in what-after-the-lights-go-out films before --Patricia Rozema's fine female-centric INTO THE FOREST comes to mind from TIFF15. (Re)learning to hunt, farm, milk, slaughter, rig, homestead, make do. And the fragility and inherent danger in renegotiating gender relations. Being thrown back to existential questions of survival can be cleansing, liberating, exhilarating, purposeful, we learn. "Berlin is boring," Armin dismissively tells Kirsi, who longs to move on, and he likely means not fulfilling or meaningful. Just when I think this is a parable of a better life, a truer relationship, Köhler pulls that hopeful, romantic rug out from under me and leaves me devastated at the end.

What North American audiences in the year 2018 will make of the gender and privilege question here is up for debate, but if you can transcend the literal framework and see the film as a basic human exploration of search and renewal and what matters, you will find much food for thought and mood. Confronted with the unsolvable dichotomies of life, staying or going, acting or waiting, living or dying, we can’t help but wonder what our own fork-in-the-road choices mean.

IN MY ROOM is a coming-of-age story (of a 40-something), an ambiguous morality tale of growing up, taking responsibility and not getting lost in the small, external stuff. The stakes are higher if there are two of you. "Promise me you won't die," Kirsi whispers to Armin. But still leaves. “In my room” is the space a person inhabits, the way we show up for ourselves and others, apocalypse or not; loss, emptiness, absence, void, eternal hope, and all. The only comfort is The Pet Shop Boys’ closer. “Cause tonight always comes.”

by Jutta Brendemühl