“Try smiling with your nipples,” the lecturer (Karoline Herfurth) advises the new acting student Joachim (Bruno Alexander), who can’t relax at all while doing the physical exercise with his fellow students. While everyone effortlessly responds to the instructions and implements them in a playful way, he can't get out of his own way. But what would it look like to imagine, for example, a noodle being cooked softly in a hot pot? “Come on, I’m hungry,” the lecturer calls out to them. But Joachim remains tenacious at best. At the age of 20, Joachim is accepted at the renowned Otto Falckenberg School in Munich at the beginning of “Oh, this gap, this terrible gap”.
The protagonist moves from a psychiatric clinic run by his father in Schleswig-Holstein to his grandparents' majestic villa on the edge of Nymphenburg Park, leaving the long years of his childhood behind him with a train ride south. The character Joachim is the alter ego of the stage actor Joachim Meyerhoff, who has been writing autofictionally and without a fixed chronology about formative stages in his life since 2007 in an ongoing series of novels called “All Dead Fly High”. After the film adaptation “When will things finally go back to the way they never were” was released in 2023, Simon Verhoeven is now adapting the third volume. Both films share the actors of Joachim's parents (Devid Striesow and Laura Tonke), so they take place in the same MCU (the Meyerhoff Cinematic Universe).
Joachim (Bruno Alexander) experiences a lot at drama school – and a lot of it is hilarious for the audience…
The world of drama school is new and initially incomprehensible, the realm of grandparents actually seems well-known and yet seems mysterious: In the morning they start the day with a glass of champagne, which is supposed to make it easier to take numerous medications. Grandfather Herman (Michael Wittenborn) takes each tablet individually, while grandmother Inge (Senta Berger) downs them all in one go: “They already know where to go.” Their everyday life is determined by strange rituals and activities that have been meticulously observed for decades and which even advanced age can only have a minor impact on. For example, if his grandfather's joints don't cooperate with gymnastics in the morning, he stands motionless on the balcony and simply exercises internally instead.
With a great sense and sensitivity for the funny, but never really ridiculous, of an everyday life guided by extravagant rules, Simon Verhoeven (“Old White Man”) devotes a lot of time to Joachim's new life together with his grandparents, especially in the first half. The camera lovingly moves over the shelves and tables in the villa, sometimes almost losing itself in the lovingly detailed furnishings of the house, only to then elegantly find its way back to the grandparents, who treat themselves to a whiskey and cigarette at the stroke of 6 p.m. and later have to drunkenly negotiate who should get on the stair lift to the upper floor first.
Effi Briest – but as a hippopotamus
The grandmother also once had a great acting career in the theater, which was thwarted by a serious accident that resulted in a shortened leg. But what remains is her sense of melodrama, the large, clearly visible gesture that she has retained in her everyday life for years: a loud sigh of “Moooah!” when she spoons out the annual turtle soup, which has long been banned in stores. Joachim's desperate attempts to survive the probationary year at drama school also reflect her life path. What happens to him during numerous seminars and theater rehearsals at the university, however, is not so much tragic, but above all incredibly funny.
Several well-known guest stars give the film brilliantly played punch lines in small supporting roles, which make “Oh, this gap, this terrible gap” in this respect probably the funniest German comedy of recent years: be it Tom Schilling as the handicapped assistant director with a mullet haircut, who advises the acting students to play the extra roles as witches in “Faust” in an emphatically “sexy” way (“You’re fucking the tree now!”). Or the wonderful Victoria Trauttmansdorff, whose singing lessons drove Joachim to a brilliantly brittle performance of Soft Cell's hit “Tainted Love”. At the latest when, in a course led by Anne Ratte-Polle, the participants are forced to perform famous monologues from German literature in animal form and Joachim “Effi Briest” performs as a hippopotamus, the film has a comedic verve that has recently been unparalleled in German cinema.
As grandparents, Michael Wittenborn and Senta Berger give the film a great, mischievous, melancholic touch!
His wife would never have given a hippopotamus voluntarily, says the grandfather with a snort. But at least she was a hummingbird in Göttingen once, the grandmother replies. Its title is borrowed from Goethe's “The Sorrows of Young Werther”: “Ah, this gap, this terrible gap”: When what you want to become does not coincide with how you live, an empty space is created that is filled with longing. While Joachim's life becomes smaller and smaller over the course of his probationary year, the world of his grandparents, who are marked by illness, is disappearing more and more.
Simon Verhoeven tells both the emerging temptations of youth and the setbacks of old age with a masterful balance between brutal comedy and melancholic sadness – and always hits the right tone. The life of his own family is also woven into the film: the role of grandmother is played by his mother Senta Berger, the poster for a film by his father, the director Michael Verhoeven, who died in 2024, adorns the facade of the Munich Theatiner cinema in the most beautiful scene. After this masterpiece, we can only hope that Verhoeven will then film one or two volumes of Joachim Meyerhoff's novel cycle.
Conclusion: With “Oh, this gap, this terrible gap,” Simon Verhoeven creates an enchantingly funny and at the same time melancholic tragicomedy about youthful self-discovery. Between the most absurd drama school excesses and the lovingly bizarre everyday life of two grandparents marked by age, the film unfolds great narrative precision, supported by pointed supporting roles, precise equipment and sure timing. Verhoeven confidently maintains the balance between slapstick and gentle sadness, creating one of the funniest German comedies of recent years – warm-hearted, clever and emotionally surprisingly deep!