In 2017, the young director Anatol Schuster received the coveted Wim-Werner's scholarship to develop his feature film project “Silence”. But as the first movie, Anatol Schuster realized the macabre comedy “Ms. Stern”: the story of a German-Jewish pensioner who actually wants to kill herself, but fails as long as she prefers to stay alive.
FilmStarts awarded 3.5 stars and the predicate “A fascinating indie project”. Now, a whole series of years later (as is well known, the German funding mill is known to be slow), the project, which was postponed at the time, is still coming to the cinema. However, the “chaos” has also been added to the “silence”, and that is quite fitting: “Chaos and silence“As a tragic comedy, it is much more artificial than“ Mrs. Stern ”, but in the topics of addressed topics in between and over again and again.
Klara (Sabine Timoteo) moves to the roof-and thus involuntarily becomes a figure of the gallions of a new search for meaning!
Pianist Helene (Maria Spanring) and the composer Jean (Anton von Lucke) live for music, but cannot live on music. The artist couple also expect their first child, so it is a great relief that their landlady Klara (Sabine Timoteo), who lives in the same house, enacts you. But Klara is increasingly strange: she gives away her furniture, quits her job and now lives on the roof of the house.
Jean and Helene are unsure: Should you offer Klara your help? Apparently she seems to feel very comfortable in loneliness and silence up there. But Klara's decision to renounce all material values does not remain unnoticed. It becomes a galosing figure of a new movement. Jean and Helene are concerned that Klara's apartment becomes a search point for people in terms of meaning while she is withdrawing more and more …
A roof full of interpretation
Anatol Schuster refrains from explanations and largely relies on the ability of the audience to interpret his film. Why Klara decides to pull on the roof remains unclear like so much. She has money and apparently a well -paid job. Why does she give up all of this? Nevertheless, “chaos and silence” is not one of these extreme philosophy experiments for which you need a instruction to understand them. Rather, the attraction of the film lies in its different interpretation options, for which Anatol Schuster delivers small clues as puzzle parts, which, however, (presumably deliberately) do not result in a completely harmonious whole.
Certainly it is about criticism of capitalism, but behind Klara's behavior there is also the desire for absolute freedom – and Anatol Schuster shows with quiet irony that freedom is only possible if you can afford it. The poor couple has their idealism and music, but otherwise quite little. What use is idealism? “The only thing that survives is the music,” says Jean. But when asked by a child: “Who plays the music when there are no more people?” He still doesn't know. That has something of “the emperor new clothes”: the innocent child expresses the truth.
What does the clammy composer Jean (Anton von Lucke) have from the fact that a deity may live on his roof?
“Chaos and silence” is undoubtedly a rather profound, intellectual and philosophical examination of the meaning of life, but also a musical film. Anatol Schuster works with sounds and tones that are sometimes excruciating and sometimes comforting. Is it clear that creates these tones with which people get out of balance? Then she would be a kind of deity – and some suggest that the director at least played with the thought of it.
The exquisite camera work by Julian Krubasik (“We are probably the relatives”) shows Klara once as a timeless beauty in Lotossitz, blows by the white, fluttering curtains of her apartment. Then again when the sleepers rolled together in embryonic posture in the trench coat on the roof or as a walker on the middle of the road, looking at the camera with a smile. That has something very clearly divine. But what does it bring to people? And why? Can she bring the longed -for calm and silence into a world that is too loud and too fast?
Darmstadt of all places
Questions about questions, and Anatol Schuster does not even think of providing clear answers, but it serves more and more puzzle pieces with a light hand. There is certainly a wink here and there, because the film has a certain sense of humor. This applies to the overall composition, a kind of reflective first-person narrative from Jean in the form of a long flashback, but also to the location of the plot, because his film takes place in Darmstadt, of all things! Anatol Schuster was born here, and maybe he knows the roofs best here. In this city, the misery of the present appears openly – again and again it shows documentary -looking pictures of homeless people, one of them, the man with the aluminum, appears more often. But there are also many pictures of children, as a hopeful look into the future, for which Hanna, the little daughter of the artist couple, stands.
Sabine Timoto, once occupied by Christian Petzold in the appropriately titled “ghost”, is the perfect actress of Klara: a delicate woman with a mysterious charisma and a very quiet body language. It works entirely with herself, there is nothing overwhelming. The musical lovers Helene and Jean play Maria Spanring, a newcomer from Austria, and Anton von Lucke. Maria Spanring plays with a growing vertical forehead fold, an artist who becomes pragmatic as a mother, while Anton von Lucke represents the eternal idealists with his boyish appearance – a big child, curious and always on a journey of discovery. But he too has to deal with the fact that the world around him is getting out of hand. The chaos threatens. And what will become of music then? From his music?
Conclusion: Anatol Schuster's film is a kind of brain jogging, a walk in the thought in clear, beautiful pictures that sometimes seem as if they wanted to crawl into people. This can be very entertaining, but should also polarize. If you can and would like to get involved, you will have a lot of fun – and hopefully also something to think.