Edward Berger Berlin drama “Jack”: alone in the world – Tagesspiegel

12:12 clock Gunda Bartels

Thrilling drama Fabric: Edward Berger tells in “Jack” from the odyssey of a neglected and abandoned boys through Berlin.

Jack runs forever. Most of the time. Walking is too slow for him, temperate, adult. Jack’s ways are urgent, compelling, literally more necessary. So Jack’s breath is the basic melody of the only two places with symphonic string sounds accented drama. The short, flat, almost panting, rarely joyous, most tense, often panicky breathing in and out as a rhythmic element pierces his ear.

And for the eyes is there a full 85 minutes, Jack’s face . His red apple cheeks glow. Only that they do not tell of strength and exuberance of a child’s physique, but by fever, reacts with the boy to overwork and anguish.

Jack, the Ivo Pietzcker embodies serious and dedicated in his first film role, is ten . His little brother Manuel, an innocent Rauschgoldengel, six. They live in Berlin, one of them usually indifferent, often hostile city anonymous subway stations, shopping centers, roads, parking garages – and they are alone. Because mother Sanna, sweet, young, pretty, but rather playful sister, she has forgotten as responsible guardians. Not out of malice or intent; she has just met someone who has disappeared a few days, and the apartment keys it has also taken away. Again.

The story is consistently filmed on childhood eye level

No, in February in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival premiered, jointly developed film of the Grimme Prize winner Edward Berger and the actress and screenwriter Nele Mueller-Stoefen is not a tough social drama, no contribution to the socio-politically acute subject of child neglect. Although the cinematographer Jens Hrant filmed in long sequence shots and consistently childlike eye level history actually tells of nothing else.

Because Jack is here the Kümmerer, throws the household, mothers Manuel, comes after an accident on the instruction of the youth welfare office to the home, is attacked by an older boy, strikes back, runs away, drift with his brother by the city, stealing, struggle through the conflict of loyalties, to want to protect the faithless mother, takes over even their responsibility – in short, Jack is the picture-perfect sacrifice a circling around itself adult world. And it is yet not.

Jack is a dignified complex and drawn hero

“Jack” is known mechanisms without staging the consistently reduced to a few characters personnel as victims and perpetrators . The Luise Heyer convincing unsuspecting mother is played shamelessly and lovingly in the best sense, but it lacks in maturity and care. Friends and ex-boyfriends, which drive the children in search of the mother, are usual big city types who opt for Nichtkümmern in doubt. And Jack is a very dignified despite all the distress and complex drawn hero. The result is that you follow the simple story, the a priori clear predictable and quite lengthy way to Jack’s eventual adult decision with sympathy.

Berger and Mueller-Stoefen lie with their method correctly, any fat from the script to cut, “is to just skin and bones left.” So the reality was from “Jack” an avowedly reduced, more realistically, by no means denunzierender film. Nothing against clear blame in the cinema, as they are close in the case of parent-child relationships, or home life. But the scandalous casualness with which the mother suddenly emerged in recent days gone through hell sons asks, “And what have you done so,” invites a clearly subversive to gasping. This is also the moment in which Jack makes his spectacular decision. On her absent fathers include the parent as well blame. Only those are just not in the picture.

FT Friedrichshain, Hackescher Höfe, Kant, Culture Brewery, Yorck