This is certainly the case for the summer portrayed here. Summer vacations tend to be lazy ones, especially when it is hot. Again, it’s a remark that is the kind of off-the-cuff thing a West German man might say while on vacation in 1976 but that also suggests something about where the country will, finally, be headed when the children depicted here will be grownups a dozen or so years later. One of the male characters even suggests it might be time to reunite the two Germanys because East Germany is winning way too many medals during the ongoing Summer Olympics in Montreal. Whereas Ilse’s possible sexual proclivities and the tendency of her middle-aged sister, Frieda (Christine Schorn), to sunbathe fully naked - even the dentures come out in one of the film’s many small humorous touches - are frowned upon and hardly accepted by their peers, the younger Eva and Gitti are more modern women, even if they struggle with some of the changes ahead. It’s one of these seemingly throwaway lines that suggests something about changing gender dynamics in the 1970s. “It’s a stupid job and stupid jobs are for men,” Eva explains when her daughter complains that her older brother gets to help grandpa with taking down a wasp nest. Though men are present, this is very much a film about how women try to hold families together, even if they, too, tend to fight and bicker amongst themselves. Kroener uses such moments of isolation to highlight the individual tragedies of the characters, which are obvious and affecting even though often they rely on unspoken feelings and glances. She isolates herself from the others but, significantly, never calls anyone and might not even have his number. The difficulties and the sense of shame surrounding single parenthood - still quite unusual in 1976 - come through loud and clear as Kroener follows Gitti after she’s promised her daughter she’ll try and call her dad to see if he can make it to her birthday party. They can also be counted on to divulge the very information their parents told them never to repeat to anyone this is especially hurtful in an instance in which Gitti’s daughter gets to hear from one of her peers that her absent father didn’t really want to have her. As preteen children are wont to do, the cousins get along fine one moment and are almost mortal enemies the next. Gitti ( Mavie Hoerbiger) and Bernd (Thomas Loibl) are adult siblings, with Gitti a single mom with one daughter while Bernd has a boy and a girl with his wife, Eva (Laura Tonke). This is how Kroener, who also wrote the screenplay, manages to suggest a lot of very dense backstory and yet keep the main narrative, which always unfurls in the present and without any flashbacks, very lean and clutter-free. The entire film is filled with half-spoken truths and observations such as these that point to worlds of hurt and decisions and expectations in the past that have led the large clan to where they are today. Her being a spinster, in turn, might have led to her family’s expectation that she would look after their mother, simply because she was the only one without kids and thus must have had time on her hands. This would explain why the kind old lady, who was born at the turn of the century and thus survived two world wars, would have preferred to stay unmarried. But a visit from a woman who was bitten by her dog hints at the fact Ilse might actually be a closeted lesbian. “I never met the right one,” she says rather matter-of-factly when one of her siblings’ grandkids inquires why she never got married. But as gradually becomes clear, this might have less to do with Ilse’s own caring character than with society’s mores and expectations. Septuagenarian Ilse (Ursula Werner, from 2008 Un Certain Regard coup de coeur Cloud Nine) is the new matriarch of sorts, if only because she was closest to her (never seen) mother, taking care of her in old age.
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