Movie Review – Has an expression that goes to the bone

Up. Just get out. Luisa wipes her face with her hand, pieces of onion are attached – she can finally cry. He puts down the knife, his roommates in the kitchen of the residential complex on the left continue cutting vegetables – in a harmony that Luisa can no longer bear.

They are people who, like her, want to change something that Julia von Heinz focuses on in her film “And tomorrow the whole world”. But maybe it’s not enough to play the community idyll with vegan stew and organize peaceful demos. Does this prevent the Nazis from doing what the Nazis do? Back in the room, two shaggy young men strum “Bella Ciao” on the guitar. Luisa takes off her jacket from the sofa.

The cold of the world seems to harden the young activist’s face as she goes out onto the street. Get out of grumbles, get out of group consensus. And then to the two boys who load a van because they want to hunt down the Nazis. Beautiful hello, beautiful hello.

The fuse that blows everything up

It’s this expression on 24-year-old actress Mala Emde’s face that blows your bones as you watch. Again and again Luisa flashes in her figure, behind an innocent amazement of girls that fades, a giggle that vanishes. A death mask.

The script gives no clear answers as to where it came from, what is reflected in it, if it has anything to do with the noble parents’ house in the countryside, where the law student helps her father gut the game on the weekend after the hunt .

The film seems to assume that the viewer already knows what is at stake: the new normal of hate. The new right, about the birth of which we read a lot a few years ago, whose decline simply does not want to start, against which no democratic grass seems to have grown. The question that had previously only been asked by left-wing extremists was whether the police and military in Germany had been infiltrated by right-wing networks. Margarete Stokowski, wearing an Antifa T-shirt. Greta Thunberg wears an Antifa T-shirt. Maybe the fuse that blows everything up has already blown.

The camera, led by Daniela Knapp, follows Luisa like a curse, trembling and nervous, always close. No environment where there is room for breath. They are rough and melancholy images. Pollen flies when one of the two Nazi hunting boys on the way through tall grass threw himself at a flower – his own – at the desire of his own strength. summer of hate against, then Luisa. Suddenly a train rushes like adrenaline when you put your balaclavas on the bank.

Director Julia von Heinz was herself with the Antifa, she was attacked by right-wing extremists in 1991, on her 15th birthday. Like Luisa, whose radicalization begins when she lies with her face on concrete after an initially peaceful protest action, the hand of a bald Nazi between her legs, the knee on her neck. The striker in the film appears to have sprung from the bomber era of the 1990s to spread grief, but the protest was directed against an entirely current bourgeois hate party whose logo is made up of blue and red colors.

Such historical blur can be found in several places in the film, but it doesn’t hurt it. Rather, they convey the feeling of something that is both no longer and not yet real, the premonition of a screeching siren state of emergency behind a thin layer of the present. The already finished death mask of the 1920s.

“And tomorrow the whole world” deploys a historical force.

The film draws its strongest scenes from meeting a kind of Antifa ghost. Dietmar was once a big number on the scene in the 1990s and then in jail for “attacking Siemens”. Now he offers the trio Luisa and the two Nazi hunter boys refuge from the police in the stale house of his deceased father, where he lives alone, among unwashed dishes and packs of expired potato chips. He likes peace and quiet, he says, after all the time spent in the shared apartments and double cell, but the loneliness he exudes is overwhelming. He wanted to prove that he was “the tough guy,” he says. His comrades had careers while he was in prison and none of them were stupid. “Ultimately, we only had a few simple answers to a complex world.”

“And Tomorrow The Whole World” deploys a historical force, but suffers from occasional weaknesses in the script. The most macho male of Nazi hunter boys, for example, struts in the film as abundant proof of life that even some leftists want to be young and strong. At the center, however, there is a question, an abyss in which Luisa is followed with a shiver and without hesitation. Beautiful hello, beautiful hello.

From 29 October in theaters.

Published: 10/28/2020, 2:52 pm