Mein Freund aus Faro

"I am a fan of Lubitsch," Nana Neul says, "and I can’t imagine a film of my own with no humor at all. Which doesn’t mean that it needs to be less serious as a result – quite the contrary." The young director appreciates the art of omission in Lubitsch’s work, and his ability to bring together things that are so very different. It even sounds rather like Lubitsch’s simultaneously direct and "outside the box" humor when Neul adds: "I can’t avoid the fact that my films always develop a specific comedy aspect."

To date Neul has made only two feature films, but from the very beginning she filled a gap and therefore occupies a very distinct position in the German film world: one of films that are adult and yet make us laugh. It is a well-known fact that Germans don’t always have an easy relationship with humor. But Neul showed us how things might be with her latest film, "Stiller Sommer" ("Silent Summer"), which is currently being shown in German cinemas and is still attracting thousands to the festival cinemas, most recently in Ludwigshafen, for example. "Stiller Sommer" ("Silent Summer") is a tragicomedy, which sets the comic scenes of a German marriage in the South of France. Neul persuaded a whole list of highly-recognized German actors – Dagmar Manzel, Ernst Stötzner, Marie Rosa Tietjen, Victoria Trauttmansdorff, Hans-Jochen Wagner – to tell the story of a career-woman who is compelled to take some time off (and to keep quiet) by the loss of her voice. She retreats to her holiday home in France, where she meets her daughter. Soon her husband follows her there, and the round of relationships and emotions escalates in their wide circle of friends …

Neul definitely made use of various real models for this unusual and at the same time pleasantly unpretentious story with its occasionally absurd features, as she admits laughingly: "A holiday home in the South of France, a woman who loses her voice, a psychotherapist who doesn’t want to talk, and a daughter who is left not knowing which part to take between her parents because she feels ignored but wants to act as a mediator – there are parallels there, certainly, even with my own family history." She has always wanted to recount aspects of her own family life, "because my own family is really crazy, too, and you have to deal with this whole madness somehow or other."
What does a subject require to make it inspire Neul for a film? "There is usually a trigger: a crazy story that I pick up some - where and never forget," she tells me. "I am interested in the false life inside reality. I am interested in people that slip into different roles."

This kind of broken identity and searching for a place to belongwere the central themes in Neul’s first feature film, "Mein Freund aus Faro" ("My Friend from Faro"). It was shot in the Münsterland and again, it was inspired by some of the director’s own experiences. It focuses on Mel, a girl with no interest in boys who pretends to those around her that she already has a boyfriend. And who falls in love with a girl, to whom she pretends that she is a boy; and this girl is young and naive enough to believe her. And so the film is all about lies and the truth, and the truth which is concealed in lies.

Here, the Lubitsch fan in Nana Neul, who is fascinated by form, meets the Bergman fan, who is moved by the pathos of truth, and by having the courage of one’s ideas like the visiting angel in Pasolini’s "Teorema" ("Teorema – Geometrie der Liebe").

Repeatedly, the pictorial language of Neul’s films is what makes them particularly convincing. In "Mein Freund aus Faro" ("My Friend from Faro") she worked with colors in an original, consistent way. Her staging of rooms and of the protagonist is characterized by immense precision. At the same time, the director aims to reject clichés and over-obvious symbolism. Neul skillfully expands her stories into intelligent meditations about emotions and the dynamics of relationships.

Neul has many plans. There are projects with which she simply earns money, but parallel to those she is working on a total of no less than three new subjects for the cinema. They include the adaptation of a novel, together with Hans W. Geissendörfer, about the relationship between an autistic young man and a "Jehovah’s witness".

The second subject makes open reference to Buñuel with its title "Le Beau du Jour". Here, in a Berlin apartment, a German cleaner who was not always a cleaner meets an illegal immigrant, who is not actually illegal at all. Both negotiate their way around these very different stories within a small space. "He deceives those around him in the most charming of ways, and she wants to put everything right. Of course, both end up failing," says Neul. "This is a story about Germany, about false self-pity, false morals, and the difficulty of admitting true feelings." As Lubitsch might have put it: "Angst essen Seele auf" ("Fear eats the Soul") meets "Trouble in Paradise" (Ärger im Paradies").

Neul describes the third treatment as an odyssey through the Carpathian mountains, a mixture of "Moartea domnului Lăzărescu" ("Der Tod des Herrn Lazarescu") and "About Schmidt". "In both cases, it will be tragic and comical again," the director assures me – and there is no reason to doubt her.

Author: Rüdiger Suchsland

Source: German Films Marketing & Service GmbH