Through a insulated gait, Simon (Leo Konrad Kuhn) looks down at the open door that leads into the sports hall of his school. The rest of his class already has lessons. To warm up, the pupils run from left to the whistle of the teacher, who sets the pace and rhythm, back right to the left. Maybe it's just this short look, the Simon, although he had actually just changed in training clothes, moved to turn again. Perhaps it is simply the roaring realization that anyone who is 17 should have something better to do on a hot summer day than to be at school. Just what exactly? Around this question, Willy Hans' Levit Film Debüt “The stain“In which he drifted and hang around Simon, accompanied it, around and bandel.
In retrospect, these endless afternoons full of warmth and relaxed lethargy, in which it can be started without a plan and get started, perhaps to be the essence of the teenage period: something that never wants to stop and yet will be over forever. From the melancholy that arises from the memory of it, the coming-of-age genre has been melancholic gloss for a long time. In particular, American high school films, be it “Snack Shack” or “The Kings of Summer”, keep returning to the same, mythically excessive places of youth, always varying the same stories and formative experiences. With “Der Fleck”, Hans adds a film to this canon of reminiscences and summons, as it has no longer existed in the German-speaking cinema since Hans-Christian Schmid's “Crazy”.
Simon (Leo Konrad Kuhn) doesn't feel like (sports) lessons.
On the way home, Simon meets his friend Enes (Shadi Eck), who is leaning out of the open driver's door of a car: “Do you feel like you?” It goes to a place on the river, in the middle of a forest that some have already driven ahead: friends of friends, a little older who have just graduated from high school. There is one that Simon is a bit mocking at the beginning, and another who combines a sleeveless Fred Perry blouse with baseball cap and looks much too cool in that Simon would dare to chat with her. And a guy who seems more grown -up tells any story about his cousin, in which he himself notices that she does not head for a joke and no punch line. Slowly, the camera, which observes it, becomes blurred, fixes something in the background on the bank, as if the film loses interest in this wonderfully targetless gift for a short moment.
Again and again the look shifts in “The Spot”: From two girls kissing in a bushes, the film drifts too puzzling, suddenly overexcuting settings of the forest: a rock on the shore overgrown with moss, the circular flag in the river or a tree that falls to the ground, which becomes close to its own, tempting microcosm. Then again the camera seems to look through Simon's eyes, suddenly tips on to the side when it is hit by a sharply thrown ball on the face. The internal area of experience of youth and external nature as a sensory world with very own laws seem to fall into one.
Abstract on 16mm
Willy Hans also touches the proximity to the pure experimental film again and again. But even if the film can never be seen in the cards, there is nothing to be playful. The choice of turning “the stain” on an analog 16mm material is not just a comfortable retro marker. The color features of the celluloid and the stricter grain of the material are very significantly shaped by the visual world development of the film and develop their own form of tender psychedelic.
From abstract sequences, however, the film always finds dreamers back to its story: When Simon actually wants to return through the forest with the increasingly bored stroll, suddenly appears as a passenger on a motorcycle Marie (Alva Schäfer). She wears a crochet vest over a frayed shirt, has colored hair in blue and green grades and without wague she creates Simon to put her change together and get a portion of fries together at the nearby rest area.
The title “Spot” is a place on a river in a forest where the students spend a sunny summer day.
How this encounter can transform and change Simon, his actor Leo Konrad Kuhn plays in his feature film debut with a great sense of the conflicting sensations of the teenage years: shy, but curious; observing, but distant. In how he tries to keep the wind when lighting a tilt with the stroke -wooden box in the palm of your hand, striving to affect his fingers, it can be seen how exactly the look for details of the film is, how precisely the director is the precise capacity of young people gestures and movements.
The locations are also specifically and meaningfully chosen: a paved underpass on the highway, on which Simon and Marie share the shackle of a plastic bottle, a nasty sofa that someone dragged on the lake shore and on which the two shoots together with Simon's cell phone. It is the exuberant abundance of all these details that makes something of a long -term uneventful afternoon that reverberates a whole life in memory.
Conclusion: Drift and hang around from the youngsters, rum and bandel on a hot summer day Willy Hans tells in his feature film debut between coming-of-age melancholy and idiosyncratic experimental film aesthetics. With that, “the stain” has what it takes to be the future teenager classic!