A provincial teenage girl’s dreams of romantic adventure take some dark turns in Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything, writer-director Emily Atef’s Berlin competition contender. Faithfully adapted from Daniela Krien’s hit 2011 novel of the same name, this handsome historical drama takes place in a sunny rustic corner of East Germany at the end of the Cold War. It feels sumptuous and polished, with its seductive landscapes and solid ensemble cast, but the dramatic treatment is oddly passionless for a film about transgressive desire and sadomasochistic sex. Fifty shades of tedium? Nein danke.
Born in Berlin to French-Iranian parents, Atef is a regular at big European festivals. Her feted Romy Schneider mini-biopic 3 Days in Quiberon (2018) world premiered in competition at the Berlinale and went on to win seven Lolas, the German Oscar equivalent. But Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything is a more conventional coming-of-age affair, ponderously overlong and obstinately sombre. It opens in German cinemas in April, where the book’s domestic success and local political context should help secure sympathetic interest. In other markets, this deluxe soap opera will face a tougher challenge to connect with audiences.
The backdrop is a sleepy East German farming village in the sultry summer of 1990. With the Berlin Wall down, this long-divided nation is in the bumpy early stages of reunification, which is having a devastating effect across the old Communist East. Atef and Krien, who share screenwriting credits, only sketch out this wider socio-economic context using clumsy chunks of exposition, as minor characters dutifully relate the turmoil happening off screen.
A coltish beauty who buries herself in books and secret passions, 19-year-old Maria (Marlene Burow) has abandoned her boozy, depressive, divorced mother Hannah (Jördis Triebe) to live with her boyfriend Johannes (Cedric Eich) and his family on their sprawling farm. Despite the seismic changes sweeping Europe just beyond the horizon, Maria and Johannes seem to inhabit an endless summer of poetry and sunshine, fresh air and wild swimming. They make an exploratory foray into West Germany, and later share an awkward dinner with the family’s prodigal son Hartmut (Christian Erdmann), who can finally return from exile after defecting 20 years before. But otherwise the churn of history does not seem to touch them
Beneath this picture postcard panorama of pastoral bliss, however, darker currents are at work. Increasingly bored with the boyishly innocent Johannes, Maria is also conducting a secret affair with neighbouring farmer Henner (Felix Kramer), a flinty loner twice her age with a taste for rough, kinky, borderline-abusive sex. Henner would be a creepy antagonist in most films but Atef paints him as intense and charismatic, a soulful outsider unchained from the shackles of bourgeois convention. He is Heathcliff, Mr Darcy and Stanley Kowalski rolled into one. An archetype, in other words, who feels two-dimensional at best here.
Although Maria and Henner are apparently drawn together by raw animal lust, the film can only muster lukewarm screen chemistry. When she raises the prospect of leaving Johannes and going public with their love, he hesitates, warning that they will both face harsh social rejection. A sudden tragedy rounds off the story, but it feels like a lazy plot device engineered for neat narrative closure, not an honest depiction of real humans and their messy emotions. It was already hard to invest in the protagonists, with their bizarrely self-destructive and poorly explained motives, so their downfall feels largely affectless and not the heartbreaking pay-off the film-makers presumably intended.
Atef and Krien pepper Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything with literary references, most notably nodding to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, perhaps an allusion to its lethal central love triangle. But their own narrative is too low on novelistic psychology. To explain Maria’s reckless attraction to Henner, we learn that she barely knows her father, who left her mother years ago and has now married a Russian woman scarcely older that his own daughter. Which is kindergarten-level Freud but scarcely adequate as character shading.
In its favour, Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything offers lush visuals and glossy production values. Cinematographer Armin Dierolf’s sun-drenched depiction of East Germany as a cosy prelapsarian Eden is a richly sensual pleasure, and echoes how the old Communist regime promoted itself to its own citizens. One stand-out scene features a Trabant, that flimsy little Eastern Bloc lawnmower masquerading as a car, which rolls over in a roadside crash but can still be lifted up manually and driven away afterwards. The accident seems to hint at suicidal depression but the effect is broadly comic, a rare moment of levity in a relentlessly glum film. A mournful, heavy-handed score by Christoph Kaiser and Julian Maas only adds to this stifling air of sullen, self-absorbed melancholy. With the right material, Atef is a capable and imaginative director, but this laborious melodrama only confirms the golden rule that there are few things more boring than other people’s erotic fantasies.
Director: Emily Atef
Screenwriters: Emily Atef, Daniela Krien
Cinematography: Armin Dierolf
Editing: Anne Fabini
Music: Christoph M. Kaiser, Julian Maas
Production design: Beatrice Schultz
Costume design: Gitti Fuchs
Producer: Karsten Stöter
Production company: Row Pictures (Germany)
World sales: The Match Factory
Venue: Berlin international Film Festival (Competition)
In German
129 minutes