With only one other review so far as a benchmark, I can't let that highly positive rating go unchallenged. This film bears no resemblance whatsoever to Lost in Translation, is sooooooooo painfully slow and repetitive, and though it touches on the 2019-2020 protests, these have nothing at all to do with the story.
It's interesting to know that the star and several characters were related or known to the director, but this also added nothing. The lady's son never shows up, her encounters with the supporting actors are superficial, and at no time apart from not being able to enter her son's flat at first is she ever in any apparent distress, or for that matter show any emotion at all.
The first 30 minutes, in Germany, were punctuated by long, moody shots of nature, and if reminiscing about her old house was meant to set some sort of tone, I missed the point altogether.
Let me not be uniformly negative: I live in the district where this was filmed, and many of the location shots were realistic. But these didn't save the film. For intuitive reasons we haven't had any mainstream films zeroing in on the protest period here yet -- and they will never appear here even if they are made -- but this film unfortunately doesn't come close.
It's interesting to know that the star and several characters were related or known to the director, but this also added nothing. The lady's son never shows up, her encounters with the supporting actors are superficial, and at no time apart from not being able to enter her son's flat at first is she ever in any apparent distress, or for that matter show any emotion at all.
The first 30 minutes, in Germany, were punctuated by long, moody shots of nature, and if reminiscing about her old house was meant to set some sort of tone, I missed the point altogether.
Let me not be uniformly negative: I live in the district where this was filmed, and many of the location shots were realistic. But these didn't save the film. For intuitive reasons we haven't had any mainstream films zeroing in on the protest period here yet -- and they will never appear here even if they are made -- but this film unfortunately doesn't come close.
