Visitation

From Viennale

The only character who never ages is the gardener. Keeping his mouth shut throughout the film, he tends to the flowers, bushes and trees while the house and its garden cottage by the side of a lake are built, inhabited and taken over by people across the generations. Based on the novel by Jenny Erpenbeck, HEIMSUCHUNG stretches from pre-war Germany until after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A farmer’s daughter drowns herself in the lake. A Jewish textile manufacturer moves in with his family. An architect and his wife throw parties with champagne and crayfish only to be replaced later by a communist writer. Her granddaughter is the film’s narrator. With a static camera acting like its visual mouthpiece, the house, like the gardener, watches the comings and goings stoically. Even when events turn brutal and unjust, the Oscar-winning Volker Schlöndorff directs his cast (including Martina Gedeck, Susanne Wolff and Lars Eidinger) in almost idyllic tableaus, thus visualising the lean yet powerful prose of Jenny Erpenbeck, with whom he developed the script. HEIMSUCHUNG, a word that translates as haunting, stands here for the unrealistic longing for home as an apolitical haven. (Anna Katharina Laggner)