A sprawling three-hour symphony of tragicomic angst, depressive divas and dysfunctional family dynamics, Dying is a flavoursome exercise in high-class soap opera from Berlinale competition contender Matthias Glasner. Partly conceived as a memorial to the German writer-director’s own parents, this pan-generational contemporary drama has a very personal feel, touching on emotionally raw areas with a level of detail that feels autobiographical. Fortunately, themes of regret and guilt and unresolved parental friction will resonate with a fairly wide audience, especially since Glasner packages them with enough self-aware humour to avoid sliding into navel-gazing pomposity. Dying is long film, a little baggy and overheated in places, but mostly compelling and funny and tonally rich enough to justify its marathon runtime.
Back in Berlin with his first theatrical feature in 12 years, Glasner has spent most of the last decade directing for television, notably the hit German U-boat series Das Boot. Indeed, there is an episodic miniseries feel to Dying, which is divided into five chapters plus epilogue, with the first three overlapping sections dedicated to a single member of the central family. Initial focus is on stoical 70-something matriarch Lissy Lunies (Corinna Harfouch), who is striken by multiple health problems including incontinence, diabetes, and terminal cancer. She is also struggling to care for her husband Gerd (Hans-Uwe Bauer), whose worsening dementia eventually requires relocation to a nearby nursing home. Taking place in a small town in northern Germany, this melancholy opening act promises a much bleaker film than Glasner’s bittersweet saga proves to be.
The second chapter mostly concerns Tom Lunies (Lars Eidinger), Lissy and Gerd’s middle-aged son, a Berlin-based conductor who is working with a youth orchestra on the upcoming premiere of a piece called Dying, composed by Tom’s depressive long-time friend Bernard (Robert Gwisdek). Though entangled in a non-commital romance with his assistant Ronja (Saskia Rosendahl), Tom is clearly more emotionally invested in assuming a keen stepdad role for his ex-partner Liv (Anna Bederke), who has just given birth to a baby daughter. A busy, successful, self-absorbed artist who is semi-estranged from his dying parents, Tom appears to be the film’s most obvious Glasner surrogate.
The final panel in this triptych is Tom’s hot mess of a sister, Ellen Lunies (Lilith Stangenberg), a Hamburg-based dental assistant with a wild streak and a major alcohol problem. Her all-day booze binges are plainly a danger to her health, leading her to make ill-advised life choices, notably an affair with her married co-worker Sebastian (Ronald Zehrfeld). A blur of late-night dive bars, killer hangovers and disastrous side effects, including a comical episode of projectile vomiting during a hushed concert performance, this chapter becomes a little repetitive and predictable. Watching damaged, needy drunks acting like damaged, needy drunks can have serious dramatic purpose but, on screen as in life, it rarely makes for interesting drama.
Switching to a more collective viewpoint for the film’s final hour, Glasner steers his characters to articulate a thesis about how great art needs to find that crucial “thin line” between emotional authenticity and jarring kitsch, a target which Dying itself does not always hit. These latter chapters ramble a little, but their roomy, novelistic dimensions do have some advantages. There is enough capacity here, for example, to accommodate extended set-pieces that feel like stand-alone two-hander plays, including a brutally funny discussion between Lissy and Tom about why they never liked each other, and a more delicate debate between Tom and Bernard about the ethics of lending support when a suicidal friend wants to end their life.
Mostly drawing its dramatic power from a superb ensemble cast and sharp-witted script, Dying is a fairly straight package aesthetically, classically shot in naturalistic mode by cinematographer Jakub Bejnarowicz. But there are striking visual flourishes here, including a kinetic opening montage of credits painted on canvas, unscrolling to a frenetic jazzy score. Music is key to most of the main characters, and features heavily, from long passages of Tom’s conducting work to Ellen spontaneously breaking into obscure folk-rock ballads to cheering Hamburg bar audiences. A full performance of Bernard’s orchestral piece also features in the final act, staged at the Berliner Philharmonie concert hall, directly behind the Palast cinema where the film festival’s gala screenings take place, a pleasingly meta piece of accidental symmetry. In case the autobiographical undercurrents are not clear by the final credits, Glasner ends with a personal dedication: “for my family, the living and the dead.”
Director, screenwriter: Matthias Glasner
Cast: Lars Eidinger, Corinna Harfouch, Lilith Stangenberg, Ronald Zehrfeld, Robert Gwisdek, Anna Bederke, Hans-Uwe Bauer, Saskia Rosendahl
Cinematography: Jakub Bejnarowicz
Editing: Heike Gnida
Music: Lorenz Dangel
Sound design: Christoph Walter, Nils Vogel-Bartling
Production design: Tamo Kunz
Producers: Jan Krüger, Ulf Israel, Matthias Glasner
Produced companies: Port au Prince Film & Kultur Produktion (Germany),
Schwarzweiss Film Produktion (Germany), Senator Film Produktion (Germany)
World sales: The Match Factory
Venue: Berlinale (Competition)
In German, English
180 minutes
