Jürgen Prochnow, once Germany's showcase cinema export (“Das Boot”, “Air Force One”), is far from thinking about retirement and has not been active in recent years as it has been for a long time. After appearances in Atom Egoy

Posted by Outzen Mcguire on January 15th, 2021

Ukraine 2014: A car drives through an empty rainy country road with potholes. A moustachioed man sits at the wheel, in the passenger seat you can see a crying woman, Eduard Leander (Jürgen Prochnow) lies across the back seat. Maybe he's sleeping, maybe he's dead. About ten days earlier: Hilde, the 92-year-old Eduard's wife, dies gently in front of the cigarette box. After the funeral (“The funeral feast is canceled, you can go home!”), The widower is drawn to Ukraine, where he once fought as a Wehrmacht officer with a Cossack corps against the Red Army. Eduard's daughter Ulrike (Suzanne von Borsody, "Hannas Reise", "Lola rennt") sends the granddaughter Adele (Petra Schmidt-Schaller, "Stereo", "Sommer in Orange") to stop the elderly man. But Fmovie with the discontinued studies finally accompanies the taciturn grandpa on his journey ... Leander's Last Journey Trailer DF Director and screenwriter Nick Baker-Monteys has big plans: He not only tells the story of a family over three generations and gives it a complex historical background, but also parallels the old conflicts with the current political situation. Sometimes that seems a little intentional, but in the end it is also the greatest attraction of this film. The carefully researched historical lining throws a revealing light on the muddled situation in Ukraine since 2014, in which the locals are individually faced with extremely difficult decisions - like Adele's acquaintance Lev (played by Estonian Tambet Tuisk, known from "Poll"), a Ukrainian-born Russian torn between his western lifestyle and his Russian roots. As much as the dramaturgical link between Leander's past and the future of love between Adele and Lew is convincing in the design, the details are not very successful. Leander's granddaughter is very much reduced to her narrative function: at first the waitress is not interested in politics at all, but then suddenly she asks her grandpa a lot of questions about the Cossacks and at the same time wants to know everything about the current crisis from her lover Lew. In this way, the audience is provided with basic information in a somewhat transparent and inelegant way, but this behavior does not really fit the figure introduced earlier and the change of heart is not made comprehensible. And similar narrative fuzziness shapes the entire story of the now shrunken and broken three-generation family of Adele, Ulrike and Eduard. As the film progresses, one learns the main reason for the family tensions: Eduard and Hilde's marriage was a loveless arrangement - it is rumored that neither of them ever smiled. While it becomes clear why Adele, her Ulrike, who is almost only present on the phone, and her grandfather are similar in their cold feeling, one learns almost nothing over the 60 years since the war. The family never gets a narrative foundation, the details do not make a coherent whole. And also about Jürgen Prochnow's title character, who is newly widowed after the abandoned childhood sweetheart Swetlana, only occasionally real emotions come into play, although the star definitely shows that he is a real character actor. But on the one hand you don't really take the old nineties from the sprightly seventies, which is mainly due to the unconvincing age make-up, and on the other hand the material doesn't do it justice. Because the staging, which appears to be trying, with its drone images and some exhibited “bravura pieces” such as the train ride in the center reinforce it

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Outzen Mcguire

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Outzen Mcguire
Joined: January 15th, 2021
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