At the beginning of “Maysoon” everything is so harmonious that we immediately suspect: It can’t stay that way. A day at the lake with the kids – swimming, playing soccer, dozing in the sun, with watermelon and fries with ketchup. This couple, consisting of the Egyptian Maysoon (Sabrina Amali) and the German Tobi (Florian Stetter), seems happy. And yet escalation is already just around the corner. You can perhaps even sense this in Tobi’s eyes, at least when no one is looking.
Then it actually arrives, the break, and it turns out that neither Tobi nor Maysoon are even remotely prepared for it. It starts as a normal argument, somehow out of the blue and seemingly without cause, and then it’s out loud: Tobi has been having an affair, for a long time, with his boss Julia (Susanne Bormann). In the meantime, it briefly seems as if something could be saved: an affair can always happen, says Maysoon, they are an adult, modern couple, she just would have preferred not to know about it. But gradually the realization sets in: It’s something serious, Tobi wants out of this relationship.
The harmony is deceptive. Only a little later there is a momentous break.
From this point on, everything escalates and Maysoon loses control. It’s not just the separation from Tobi that turns into a war, during which she forbids her ex from having contact with the children. Involuntary outbursts of anger also occur in other situations: towards children as well as in a professional context. This is where Maysoon’s situation becomes significantly worse, because she is fired from her position as a museum guide in the New Museum in Berlin, and without a job her residence permit is in jeopardy. And this in turn breaks down old traumas, because before her arrival in Germany, Maysoon was an activist in the Arab Spring.
She can’t go back, and her family has also broken off contact with their daughter after Maysoon’s brother was arrested and murdered in prison for contact reasons. So not only a few things, but somehow everything comes together in Nancy Biniadaki’s film. But the question of how exactly it all fits together remains largely open at the end. What kind of film does “Maysoon” want to be? A family and separation drama? A reappraisal of political upheavals? A film about the precarious situation in a life with limited toleration status? A little bit of all of this? The various storylines never really come together, and everything remains in a strange state of suspense.
A thoroughly ambivalent title heroine
However, this in particular should not only be viewed negatively – it also prevents “Maysoon” from becoming a mere, paper-filled thematic and problematic film. Instead, he is remembered with an energy of his own. The greatest strength of Biniadaki’s production is that for long stretches it allows itself to be somewhat unreservedly involved in its protagonist’s self-destructive trip. The film is apparently happy to pay the price of making Maysoon rather unsuitable as an unrestricted likeable figure, and this fundamentally ambivalent tone to its narrative basically only makes it more interesting.
So Maysoon’s freak out and her anger-filled campaign against Tobi are justified by her existential needs, but we as viewers are in no way emotionally compelled to approve of them. Rather, we are forced to look at many different levels individually and differentiate: between politics and love, past traumas and current injuries, systemic injustices and the things that should be accepted more calmly because that’s just how life works.
The fact that the audience is not always completely on Maysoon’s (Sabrina Amali) side is an absolute strength of the film.
In its best moments, “Maysoon” is a bundle of energy that swings here and there unpredictably. He develops a destructive power that is perhaps primarily reminiscent of Michael Hofmann’s largely forgotten and – also as a school of ambivalence in times that are often all too clear – urgently worth rediscovering “Sophiiiie!” (2002) recalled. In its weaker moments, however, “Maysoon” is a film that can’t quite decide whether it would rather tell this story or that. Either way: Director Biniadaki never takes the easy, expected path, and that alone makes this perhaps not entirely successful but ambitious film worth seeing in the end.
Conclusion: “Maysoon” never really knows what kind of film it actually wants to be, but the wandering between different narrative threads that never quite come together in conjunction with an undirected and quite destructive energy lifts it pleasantly out of the expected thematic film monotony. Not entirely successful, but interesting.