TALK TO ME - CAMBRIDGE FILM FESTIVAL

 Larkin was only half right – yes, your mum and dad do f*** you up; but it also works in reverse: children can and sometimes do f*** up their parents too. Mother-daughter relationships can be fraught, a battle of wills in which any victories are palpably Pyrrhic. The complexities of parent-child relationship are subtly handled in German director Janin Halisch’s debut feature. It is a movie that actually moves slowly; nothing much happens except a world of emotions play out beneath a shallow surface.

Karo (28) has a melancholic gloom hanging over her. Her boyfriend dumps her (the sex was not going well). Her divorced father hasn’t been around for years but Karo perhaps yearns for an absent dad. To cheer her up, Karo’s 50 year-old mum Michaela imposes a trip to the seaside – a week on the Baltic. Naturally in the law of relationship movies, such panaceas do not go well. Mother Michaela (fine performance from Barbara Phiipp) is still a bit of wild child, something of the overgrown child in her. Meanwhile her actual child wants peace, time to reflect and take lots of cold-water dips.

You don’t have a film set on the Baltic without plenty of watery metaphors. We see Karo in the sea, in the shower, dipping a troubled brow beneath the surface of her bath. Meanwhile mum is flirting with a divorced father who has his own troubled tdaughter. There are moments of tenderness between ma and offspring, gentle, loving moments. This is a film of more complex trajectories, life rather than melodrama. Both need to learn to talk.

Karo is played with nuanced unhappiness by Alina Stiegler. She gives a mighty turn in a karaoke bar with her character’s favourite torch song, Bonnie Tyler’s ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’. Its words about loss especially poignant as we discover what or who is the gaping hole in Karo’s not-yet-come-of-age life.

This a finely-crafted film; unshowy, close up and richly personal. And one not without hope - there is a glimmer that being f***-up can be reversed. That’ll teach old Larkin!