A sixteen-year-old bunks off school on a hot summer’s day and heads to the river to hang out with a group of other teens in Skill Issue, the debut feature of German director Willy Hans, which premiered at the Locarno Film Festival and screens in the Kinoscope section at the Sarajevo Film Festival. It’s a simple premise, and you could say nothing much has happened by the film’s end, but at the same time, the day has an air of transformative significance about it. This is no ordinary coming-of-age movie, and something subtly strange yet hard to define is at play. Hans was a student of German arthouse director Angela Schanelec while studying film in Hamburg, and there is a sense that in watching Skill Issue, as when immersing ourselves in her films, we have been handed a secret key to a world where the line between the banal and the sublime is very thin. The teens drift through languid hours, engaging in realistic chatter about nonsense in a realm of nature that’s infused with a strange quality of mystery and shifting unpredictability. The elliptical and uncanny aspects of the film might make it a tougher sell for wide distribution, but they will draw others to its uniqueness, and ample more festival spots should follow.
On this day tousle-haired and sensitive teen Simon (Leo Konrad Kuhn) is guided by spontaneous urges and chance events, starting from his whim to slip out of the locker room rather than joining his classmates in the gym. The string of fortuitous coincidences leads him to meet Maria (Alva Schaefer), a girl with green highlights who returns his guarded looks of interest. Surreptitious glances that scrutinise, searching for cues and validation and tentatively feeling out potential connection, form a whole language of their own in Skill Issue, which captures the anxieties of adolescence around how to define oneself or fit into a group, as the river-goers hang out, indulging in smalltalk and joking around. An outlier, only part of the group after running into a former classmate outside school and accepting his casual invitation to tag along, Simon stays distant and on the edge, quietly observing. A mishap and a nosebleed are a catalyst for him and Maria to split off to take a walk, finding themselves in the midst of wild undergrowth peppered with the domestic urban castoffs of dumped fridges and furniture.
There is a hint of mysticism and dreamlike otherworldliness to this film of play and experimentation, which was shot on 16mm, that sets its mood apart from more conventional coming-of-age cinema. A fascination with light and atmospheric effects leans toward the psychedelic, as the camera glides over tree leaves and reflective water, and an impressive outdoor party scene as day turns to night made up of as much mud as electricity. One of the teens recalls a dream about being a tree in an open field, and these kind of suggestive images remind us that we are in a universe of shape-shifting magic and illusory visions — the world of cinema rather than reality, where anything might and can happen. At one point, a clapperboard even appears within the frame to demarcate an acted scene, in a small film-within-a-film tease; in another moment, kids dressed up like robots inexplicably toddle around. Other hints of the absurd add humour, as when a couple discuss waterparks, totally covered by a towel, like cartoon ghosts at the beach.
Simon and Maria seem far from civilisation as they navigate the wilderness and each other’s facades, diffident and unsure but tentatively getting closer. It’s a form of wilfully getting lost for a short stretch of time that does not preclude multiple selfies, which they later review together, as if connection for this generation must always be digitally framed, mediated and validated. The English-language title (the original, different German one Der Fleck means “the spot”) is suitably elusive and oblique, but points to that uncertainty of youth, where kids are inexperienced in reading each other, or determining what the game of human relationships really is and how to avoid losing.
Director, Screenwriter: Willy Hans
Editing: Willy Hans, Matthias Graatz
Cast: Leo Kuhn, Alva Schäfer, Shadi Eck, Felix Maria Zeppenfeld, Darja Mahotkin, Malene Becker, Charlotte Hovenbitzer, Lasse Stadelmann, Ruby M. Lichtenberg, Sina Genschel, Rumo Wehrli, Matthias Neukirch, Michael Neuenschwander, Valentina Fischli
Producers: Julia Cöllen, Frank Scheuffele, Karsten Krause
Cinematographer: Paul Spengemann
Music: Isolée, Daniel Hobi, Christoph Blawert
Sound: Marco Teufen
Production companies: Fünferfilm, 8horses
Venue: Sarajevo (Kinoscope)
In German
94 minutes
