A rape drama is not the kind of film you look forward to seeing. Yet The Most Beautiful Couple is one you will be glad you saw, and a well-made film all around.
Sunday, September 9. 2018
#TIFF18 #review: The Most Beautiful Couple
A rape drama is not the kind of film you look forward to seeing. Yet The Most Beautiful Couple is one you will be glad you saw, and a well-made film all around.
Liv and Malte, two young married teachers, are viciously attacked by three youths, Liv raped and Malte forced to watch, helplessly. Years later, the couple and the rapist cross paths again and a cat-and-mouse game begins that reopens the wounds.
The first 10 minutes of the film are filled with anxiety, threat, violence, humiliation, degradation, despair. Writer-director Sven Taddicken spares the couple and the viewers nothing but the opening is necessary to understand the next 80 minutes. Then the real story, the relationship drama and the recovering begins. How do you have a (somewhat normal) life or relationship or sex after, despite what happened to you? How do you make sense of senseless crime? Not new questions, but Taddicken and his outstanding actors —first and foremost Luise Heyer (in Dark at TIFF17), and Maximilian Brueckner— approach it carefully, delicately and thoughtfully. It is not an easy film to get right but they do so largely from the opening scene to the astounding ending.
“How can a song get stuck in your head although you hate it?” music teacher Malte asks his high school students two years after the fateful chance encounter, still loving, living and working with Liv. But we sense the occasional underlying hesitation, caution, thought, doubt that permeates their daily routine.
Without giving away any plot twists, the film is not merely a psychological drama, it veers enough into a revenge thriller to keep you on edge the entire time. Reminiscent of Philip Groening’s work (The Police Officer's Wife; My Brother's Name is Robert and He is an Idiot) in its uncomfortable intensity and taboo breaking, Taddicken’s film is still more watchable and less formally experimental than a Groening, which is not to say that it does not feature even-handed camera work (I later read that the entire film was, unusually, shot on one standard lens) and supportive sound design. Taddicken might be largely unknown in North America --he was nominated for a Student Oscar in 2000--, but is a mid-career director in his home country Germany, successful over the past decade with Emma’s Bliss and Original Bliss. From his titles alone you can deduct that Taddicken is interested in happiness and how much or how little of it we get. This TIFF world premiere might put him on a larger map.
I was most impressed by how Taddicken dealt with the inherent gender question around rape. The creative team manages to believably portray the couple as victims of the attack, each as a human being suffering and struggling and looking for explanations and a way forward, together as well as each in their own way. There is a beautiful core scene at the kitchen table where Liv spells out what's at stake in their lives with this trauma. How much do you tell whom when? How much do you tell each other, how much do you lock away, are the more intimate questions that come up as Liv jokingly reports she is “officially healed” after therapy. Fear, suppression, self-accusation, guilt, a sense of responsibility (to report in order to prevent other rapes) keep creeping up on them, and their hands are forced again when the rapist reappears. Inserting the rapist figure into the recovery story not just as a plot-mover is a challenge, but one that mostly rings true, thanks largely to fearless actor Leonard Kunz (soon to be seen in Das Boot).
We get a strong and urgent sense of the unfairness of it all, while Liv and Malte are so valiantly and openly fighting the injustice they experienced and doing everything right: therapy, talking, checking in with the police, dancing/singing/boxing to regain a sense of control over their lives. The way Taddicken and the actors (and the camera) let us into the couple's lives gets scarily close — Liv and Malte could be us, so how would we react, how would we feel, what would we do?
Perhaps their biggest issue is that they left a few crucial feelings until the very end: anger, grief, and a sort of liberating acceptance of non-closure.
It might sound strange but The Most Beautiful Couple is a tentatively hopeful, strangely positive, and certainly resilient film that does not try to analyse things away and never rings false (nor does it give false hope). The Most Beautiful Couple is the most beautiful couple, caring, connected, circling back to each other through the fog, willing to walk 500 miles and 500 more, as The Proclaimers' song in the film goes. The final scene is one big bold allegory of marriage, renewal and life force.
by Jutta Brendemühl
The first 10 minutes of the film are filled with anxiety, threat, violence, humiliation, degradation, despair. Writer-director Sven Taddicken spares the couple and the viewers nothing but the opening is necessary to understand the next 80 minutes. Then the real story, the relationship drama and the recovering begins. How do you have a (somewhat normal) life or relationship or sex after, despite what happened to you? How do you make sense of senseless crime? Not new questions, but Taddicken and his outstanding actors —first and foremost Luise Heyer (in Dark at TIFF17), and Maximilian Brueckner— approach it carefully, delicately and thoughtfully. It is not an easy film to get right but they do so largely from the opening scene to the astounding ending.
“How can a song get stuck in your head although you hate it?” music teacher Malte asks his high school students two years after the fateful chance encounter, still loving, living and working with Liv. But we sense the occasional underlying hesitation, caution, thought, doubt that permeates their daily routine.
Without giving away any plot twists, the film is not merely a psychological drama, it veers enough into a revenge thriller to keep you on edge the entire time. Reminiscent of Philip Groening’s work (The Police Officer's Wife; My Brother's Name is Robert and He is an Idiot) in its uncomfortable intensity and taboo breaking, Taddicken’s film is still more watchable and less formally experimental than a Groening, which is not to say that it does not feature even-handed camera work (I later read that the entire film was, unusually, shot on one standard lens) and supportive sound design. Taddicken might be largely unknown in North America --he was nominated for a Student Oscar in 2000--, but is a mid-career director in his home country Germany, successful over the past decade with Emma’s Bliss and Original Bliss. From his titles alone you can deduct that Taddicken is interested in happiness and how much or how little of it we get. This TIFF world premiere might put him on a larger map.
I was most impressed by how Taddicken dealt with the inherent gender question around rape. The creative team manages to believably portray the couple as victims of the attack, each as a human being suffering and struggling and looking for explanations and a way forward, together as well as each in their own way. There is a beautiful core scene at the kitchen table where Liv spells out what's at stake in their lives with this trauma. How much do you tell whom when? How much do you tell each other, how much do you lock away, are the more intimate questions that come up as Liv jokingly reports she is “officially healed” after therapy. Fear, suppression, self-accusation, guilt, a sense of responsibility (to report in order to prevent other rapes) keep creeping up on them, and their hands are forced again when the rapist reappears. Inserting the rapist figure into the recovery story not just as a plot-mover is a challenge, but one that mostly rings true, thanks largely to fearless actor Leonard Kunz (soon to be seen in Das Boot).
We get a strong and urgent sense of the unfairness of it all, while Liv and Malte are so valiantly and openly fighting the injustice they experienced and doing everything right: therapy, talking, checking in with the police, dancing/singing/boxing to regain a sense of control over their lives. The way Taddicken and the actors (and the camera) let us into the couple's lives gets scarily close — Liv and Malte could be us, so how would we react, how would we feel, what would we do?
Perhaps their biggest issue is that they left a few crucial feelings until the very end: anger, grief, and a sort of liberating acceptance of non-closure.
It might sound strange but The Most Beautiful Couple is a tentatively hopeful, strangely positive, and certainly resilient film that does not try to analyse things away and never rings false (nor does it give false hope). The Most Beautiful Couple is the most beautiful couple, caring, connected, circling back to each other through the fog, willing to walk 500 miles and 500 more, as The Proclaimers' song in the film goes. The final scene is one big bold allegory of marriage, renewal and life force.
by Jutta Brendemühl
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