Vier Minuten (aka 4 Minutes) (C. Klaus, 2008)-aNaRCHo

Vier Minuten (aka 4 Minutes) (C. Klaus, 2008)-aNaRCHo


(FILM IS IN GERMAN, ENGLISH AND FRENCH SUBTITLES INCLUDED)


The title of Chris Kraus's second feature refers to the stunning last scene of a German film that has picked up festival awards all over the world. It's a marvellous piece of cinema that hides its secrets like a Russian doll. Monica Bleibtreu plays Traude Krüger, a shrivelled-up piano teacher who has spent 60 grim years grinding scales into female inmates in Luckau prison, near Berlin. There's a Dickensian poorhouse pointlessness about this exercise until a brutish delinquent arrives with a magical musical gift.

But Jenny, a magnificently deranged yob played by Hannah Herzsprung, also has a gift for beating her cell mates - and the odd guard - to a bloody pulp. Jenny's anger derails Krüger's best efforts to get the teenage girl to a national piano final.

The relationship between the old former Nazi nurse and the damaged punk is just extraordinary. Krüger's lack of trust, indeed love, is movingly explored in flashbacks to a lesbian relationship with a childhood lover murdered by the SS. The old woman's failure to move on - from the same building and the same music - is an unspoken parable, unwittingly pricked into life again by her surly and unruly protégée.
-review from TheTimesOnline

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