More Than Ever director Emily Atef’s new film is a tale of erotic obsession and despair in the farmlands of Thuringia on the eastern side of Germany’s now vanished internal border: it is the summer of 1990, the last historic moments of the GDR. This is a movie to raise the possibility that Germany has still not perhaps made a full reckoning with the euphoric trauma of the Berlin Wall coming down. Atef finds something mythic, tragic and romantic in the great healing rupture. Something comic, too. There is a bizarre, and unexpectedly funny scene when a Trabant – that well-known symbol of communist Germany’s cultural cringe to the west – veers chaotically off the road, turning over like a biscuit box on wheels; the driver stoically shoves it back on to the road and drives off in it.
Films set in this period do tend to be about the fascinatingly alien, bygone world of East Berlin and East Germany rather than the boring old prosperous west. So it proves here. (Psychogeographers at the Berlin film festival might also ponder that the Berlinale Palast, the festival’s gleaming modern centre, is sited in what used to be West Berlin.) The setting is a farm, run by hardworking Siegfried (Florian Panzner) and his wife Marianne (Silke Bodenbender), which has just about survived the hard times of the postwar years and the economic crisis of monetary integration with the western Deutsche Mark. Their teenage son Johannes (Cedric Eich) is thrilled by the possibilities of the west, where he wants to study photography.
Johannes’s girlfriend Maria (Marlene Burow) is allowed to live with him in the attic: a dreamy girl who bunks off school and spends her days roaming the fields and reading Dostoevsky. (The film is adapted by Daniela Krien from her own novel and its title is taken from Alexei’s passionate speech at the end of The Brothers Karamazov, about how we shall explain everything about this world to each other when we rise from the dead on the Day of Judgment.) Maria occasionally goes to see her gloomy divorced mum, Hannah (Jördis Triebel), whose husband has left her for a younger woman; she is unemployed and humiliatingly forced to live with her ex-husband’s parents as a charity case.
Everywhere there is great economic unease and generational trauma; the middle-aged envy the young who can profit from this new freedom. This appears to be the case with a neighbouring farmer, Henner (Felix Kramer), a broodingly handsome older man who lives alone. Something in this charismatic man fascinates Maria, who finds herself wandering up to his property. And soon they are secretly having sex: rough, dangerous, obsessive sex in which 40-year-old Henner likes choking 19-year-old Maria – and she likes it, or at any rate accepts it as a token of his love, and wears a silk scarf to cover the bruises.
Maybe the period setting allows Atef to explore this kind of problematisch subject: the same thing in 2023 would be a trickier sell. Atef’s film is about the anger, power and submission in sex, the unacknowledged pain in desire and pleasure, male rage and self-hate. It is also about how the sexual experience has a mysterious political and historical dimension, a dimension that can make it ugly. Certainly, there is nothing obviously liberating in it for Maria, despite Henner’s supposed interest in the poetry of Georg Trakl, which he has inherited from his unhappy mother. It’s a vehement movie, with a driving narrative force and a robust sense of time and place.
• Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything screened at the Berlin film festival.
