Only a little sunlight breaks through the only window of the new penthouse apartment, which Bernard (Lenn Kudrjawizki) has set up with black furniture. The rooms literally drown in the dark. The more organic in the corner of the living room, an imaginated, pulsating black hole in the interior, which is literally crowded, fits the new, internally petrified tenant in its darkest hours. When Bernard succumbed to the temptation of this throat in the evening, the next morning only returns to normality when he carefully and routinely showered the oily residues of his trip into his own subconscious.
The relationship drama “The grasshopper's kiss” The director and screenwriter Elmar Imanov contains many such surreal, sometimes puzzling scenes that flirt with psychoanalytically charged motifs. Sometimes a bit bulky and tough, but always unpredictably kidnaps this depressing character study into the nightmare (un) places of the big city.
Bernard (Lenn Kudrjawizki) is increasingly losing himself in the black endless expanse of his own subconscious.
Bernard leads a joyless life – which also affects his environment. The writer has just taken a break from his job, and his emotionally overwhelmed girlfriend Agata (Sophie Mousel) from him. He regularly meets his father Carlos (Michael Hanemann) for dinner and also seeks physically with him when he was overnight. When Carlos attacks a man with a deformed face one evening and treated because of a head injury, the doctors become aware of a brain tumor. In the meantime, his son always meets a grasshopper in human size …
The filmmaker Elmar Imanov, who comes from Azerbaijan, already told in his Baku film debut “End of Season” without many words and in sometimes demanding settings of alienation. This formal strict also determines his second feature film project, in which he moves the scene to his hometown of Cologne. Rigid kadrases and a blue-gray color scheme are the rule in dealing with one's own grief about the death of his father who died of lung cancer. Breaking out swivel or music background in the silence of the unspoken are rarely found.
Schaf Fiete steals the show everyone steals
During a baseless subway trip to the nowhere of the nocturnal city, Bernard and Agata try emotionally, later also physically, and fail. An editor who encourages Bernard for a new text hangs on a bridge over the Clarenbach Canal, over which his jogging route leads him. Dark clouds of depression hang over the hypothermic pictures.
But light rays also make their way into it in between (head) world. Visits to a doctor's office or the police cause bizarre humor due to Bernard's sarcastic comments, which is reinforced by the fiepen of antiquated needle printer and a series of metaphorically charged camo appearances of animal co-stars: the recurring background noise of documentaries over jait and whale On television, less strange than Bernard's living together and cuddling with his roommate: the fluffy sheep.
Kafka greets: In such a surreal psychotrip into your own subconscious, a human -sized insect should of course not be missing.
Even weird is a trip to a techno club in which Bernard smooched with a human-sized grasshopper to the periodic boys of the beats and the other party. The huge insect, the author Bernard with “Grashoper's Dream” (Kafka's “The Transfer” greetings), also devotes his own story, appears again and again until Carlos died. Once he even sits as a matter of course at the counter of a bar, which of course immediately conjures up memories of David Cronenberg's modern classic “Naked Lunch” (1991).
With Lenn Kudrjawizki (“Babylon Berlin”) has found Elmar Imanov a leading actor who allows the contradictions of his stoically and niche figure, who cannot talk about her inner things and show no feelings, but still longs for comfort and closeness. This silent tragedy also runs through the film: emotional access is difficult, while metaphor and symbols invite (psychoanalytic) interpretations. And so “the kiss of the grasshopper” remains as puzzling and fascinating after a certain time to “warm up” until the end, when Bernard finally escapes the (life) reality with a self-made apparatus.
Conclusion: At the beginning, “the grasshopper's kiss” seems bulky and involuntarily funny. But with increasing term, immersing in this gloomy and surreal nightmare world is becoming easier. An ambiguous, unpredictable and fascinating film about psychological abysses.
We saw “the grasshopper's kiss” as part of the Berlinale 2025, where it was shown in the Forum section.