Alles auf Zucker
I felt an impressive amount of homesickness today. Certainly this sounds silly, and I have gone weeks without having spoken German at times, but when I feel weak, I found myself to think or dream in English instead of German. That is truly scary.
So, without further ado, here’s a German film. I picked it before it was the first one that showed up in my list, and because I knew nothing about it except that it would be a comedy. I heard he also made that Hitler movie with Helge Schneider, which I assume to be a good thing as well, so my expectations were not extremely high but at least reasonable.
Finally, the movie turned out to be pretty much exactly what I expected: Less funny than the cult classics “Sonnenallee” or “Good Bye, Lenin!” because it suffers from the same strange- and awkwardness most German comedies suffer from (why do the children all have to be incestuous anyways?), but funny enough for me to laugh out loud a few times. Opinions on the film seem to be very divided and that is more or less what I feel as well. If anything, I would compare the film, soaked with the Berliner accent, to “Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis”; just think of the Jews as a lovely culture to be made fun of, and you have the Ch’tis exactly. Sure, there are all the politics etc. but in terms of funny Jewishness, this here is more like when Woody Allen makes fun of his family or “A Serious Man” making fun of Jewishness altogether. A certain light-heartness remains at the end, and I assume that the denouement of the film is indeed difficult to swallow. When the main character recounts how everybody lived happily ever after, it is to be expected that it’s at least 50% irony yet a part of the truth remains. I think the characters are now taking their life with a grain of salt, yet there are true feelings involved in the final get-together of the family. It did not fail to move my non-Jewish Berlinian little heart.
German comedies should never be watched outside of Germany (and in fact, there are not very many French comedies I find funny either), yet at the same time I think that parts of them call for improvement. Better sex jokes for example, or leave them out altogether. “Alles auf Zucker” for example is doing absolutely great as a family comedy. At the same time I want to see “Good Bye Lenin!” again; I only saw it once in a movie theatre and inappropriately made out with my then-not-really-boyfriend.