The filmography of Zurich-based director Piet Baumgartner is a very multifaceted one, with dramatic shorts, music videos and 2023’s feature documentary The Driven Ones, which played at numerous festivals including IDFA. Little than a year later, he’s back on the circuit with his fiction feature debut Bagger Drama, selected in San Sebastián’s New Directors strand. It should play well in arthouse circles, thanks to its strong premise and committed cast.
Much like fellow New Directors entry My Eternal Summer, this is the story of a family unit of three – mother, father, young adult son – dealing with loss and the communication problems arising from it, only this time no one is on the verge of death: the passing has already occurred (the couple’s teenage daughter succumbed to injuries sustained during a canoeing accident), and the plot kicks in one year later.
Everyone tries to move on, chiefly by pouring their heart and soul into the family business, which revolves around excavators (baggers in German). It’s hard work, albeit with some levity thrown in on occasion, courtesy of a performance that involves a dance routine between machines (a visual Baumgartner already dealt with in Through My Street, the award-winning music video he made for the artist Rio Wolka, who also composed this film’s score). And yet, there’s unspoken tension bubbling beneath the professional façade: the mother is increasingly depressed, the son would like to study in the US but feels dutybound to help his parents, and the father finds himself drawn to the village’s new choir director…
We catch up with these three on a yearly basis, each chapter introduced by a shot of the river where the fatal accident occurred: a fitting image for the passage of time, as everything flows (or at least is supposed to flow), as well as the family’s inability to move on due to failure of communication. This is perhaps best shown in a scene where the father, having mastered the local dialect after living in the area for years, still finds himself more comfortable opening up in his native English – and not to his wife or child.
The pained expressions of all three are captured in almost excruciating close-ups which highlight the nearly wordless chemistry between the actors: Bettina Stucky and Phil Hayes give a lived-in quality to a marriage that is silently eroding, while Vincent Furrer, in his first film role since 2010’s Stationspiraten, shot when he was a teenager, successfully transitions in to adult acting with a role that requires him to literally come of age on screen, delicately handling even the most overused tropes (the scene where the son comes out to his mother is a great example of laughter hiding great pain).
They may be in the excavation business, but they’re unable to dig below the surface when it comes to matters removed from the workplace. The metaphor is not subtle, but the emotional sincerity that transpires from every single carefully planned shot lends it a certain weight, beyond that of the machine itself as it tries to smooth out the remnants of a sorrowful past. Until the river shows up again, leading to a new year of repressed grief, and the memories start flooding the precarious family balance one more time.
Director, screenwriter: Piet Baumgartner
Cast: Bettina Stucky, Phil Hayes, Vincent Furrer
Producer: Karin Koch
Cinematography: Pascal Reinmann
Production design: Marc Dörfel
Costume design: Linda Harper
Music: Rio Wolta
Sound: Nadja Gubser
Production company & World sales: Dschoint Ventschr Filmproduktion AG
Venue: San Sebastián International Film Festival (New Directors)
In Swiss German, English
94 minutes
