It’s the final night for a young couple in their Hanover apartment. Their belongings are packed in boxes, ready for their move to Berlin, and they’ve planned a farewell dinner party despite the pandemic. This also marks a deeper turning point, as they must decide whether to call time on their floundering relationship, or commit to a new beginning. Amid a disastrous string of preparation mishaps, the guests arrive. It initially seems that German director Lukas Nathrath’s feature debut One Last Evening, screening in the Tiger Competition at Rotterdam, will be a somewhat bland and generic romantic drama and comedy of errors. But as unexpected visitors enter the mix, the wafer-thin veneer of politeness collapses, and the film takes on a spikier, politically charged turn. The chaos that ensues serves as a microcosm of Germany in its combustible social divisions, in which personal space is more guarded than ever, and any sense of real community has fractured. While it’s not a big reveal that identity clashes have been heightened in Covid times, especially when conveyed in the film’s broad-brush terms, it is refreshing to see a German take on partying youth that digs deeper than the generic Berlin hipness, to show a millennial generation under heavy psychological pressure.
The Berlin relocation is in the cards because Lisa (Pauline Werner) has a role lined up at a leading university hospital, where she is to become a neurologist. While she is a driven achiever, her partner Clemens (Sebastian Jakob Doppelbauer) is the more sensitive and artistic of the two. A musician with one minor local hit, he’s been struggling with a crisis of self-confidence and feelings of inadequacy since a stint in a psychiatric facility, and has a pattern of self-harming.
The guests thrown together around the dinner table are easily recognisable stereotypes of modern-day German life, but inhabited with enough conviction to make them sufficiently credible. Nadja (Amerlie Schwerk) is an alternative healer whose boyfriend, to her dismay, wants an open relationship; Aaron (Valentin Richter) works in advertising and sees the world in terms of branding; Marcel (Nikolai Gemel) is an Austrian actor who has been kicked out of the State Theatre due to a scandalous performance. Meanwhile, Jan (Julius Forster), a well-off medical student with a not-so-secret crush on Lisa, can barely hide his disdain for Valerie (Isabelle von Stauffenberg), a flaky backpacker with leftist views and activist leanings — two characters who present the possibility of something different for Lisa and Clemens. Class differences cut deep, compounded by personal jealousies. The real stand-out is older, enigmatic writer Katherine (Susanne Dorothea Schneider), a neighbour who was a stranger to them before the party, and who is grieving a lost brother.
The loneliness of not being understood is a constant refrain. A poster of “Seated Woman with Bent Knees,” an artwork by Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele, hangs on the wall — a picture that everyone interprets differently, as one of the guests puts it. In the same way, the film functions as a Rorschach test of sorts for the prejudices and sympathies of the audience. Bitter resentments flare, but spontaneous new allegiances and tentative connections form, in the pressure-cooker, confined space of the apartment.
All manner of pressing contemporary topics are laid on the table in this dance of shifting connection and confrontation: a perceived German sense of superiority and prejudice against Austrians, the Holocaust and historical guilt, capitalism, grassroots activism, environmentalism, political correctness, economic privilege amid spiraling rents, the stigmatising of mental illness, and what creative expression really means. Music provides moments of release amid all the charged emotions and verbal sparring, as the dinner devolves into something more gin-soaked and messy.
The film’s scope is admirably ambitious, though too wide-reaching to do these myriad issues profound justice. But it is both suspensefully constructed and timely, as a snapshot with a sting in its tail of the anxiety and alienation of Germany’s Generation Y.
Director: Lukas Nathrath
Writers: Lukas Nathrath, Sebastian Jakob Doppelbauer
Producers: Lukas Nathrath, Linus Günther, Sebastian Jakob Doppelbauer
Editing: Silke Olthoff
Cinematography: Philip Jestaedt
Cast: Sebastian Jakob Doppelbauer, Pauline Werner, Nikolai Gemel, Isabelle von Stauffenberg, Valentin Richter, Susanne Dorothea Schneider, Julius Forster
Production Design: Saskia Stoltze
Sound Design: Tom Beckemeier
Music: Constantin Wittgenstein, Chris Köbke, Slade Templeton
Production company: Klinkerfilm (Germany)
Sales: Beta Cinema GmbH (Germany)
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (Tiger competition)
In German
91 minutes
