Hannah Herzsprung within the movie “15 Years” by Chris Kraus | EUROtoday

Fritz Lang, an professional in melodramas and crime tales, summed it up in a well-known cinematic look: “In the script it’s written, and on the screen it’s pictures.” In the script it is writing, on the display there are footage. If you need, this describes your complete drama of “15 Years”, the movie with which director Chris Kraus follows up his shock success “Four Minutes”, an excellent seventeen years later. Three years in the past, the script for “15 Years” received the Thomas Strittmatter Prize from the Baden-Württemberg Film Fund; The jury praised the “craftsmanship brilliance” of the script, which had a “high entertainment value” and on the similar time an “enormous radicalism”. But now, within the cinema, they’re photos.

It’s about Jenny, the heroine of “Four Minutes,” getting out of jail after fifteen years. She lives in a spiritual rehabilitation facility, “Team Jesus”. And she needs revenge on the person for whom she innocently served behind bars, the person who betrayed and forgotten her. When she meets a former classmate on the conservatory the place she is cleansing, the chance arises.

Because Jenny, we keep in mind, is a superb pianist, and Mangold, her classmate, now an inventive agent, brings her along with a musician from Syria, whom she is meant to accompany on the piano. Omar misplaced an arm within the civil battle in Aleppo, and Jenny’s treacherous ex-lover, who made a profession on tv below the identify Gimmiemore, now hosts a casting present through which artists with bodily disabilities seem. The Syrian-German duo is chosen, strikes on to the following spherical, and sooner or later Jenny stands in Gimmiemore’s luxurious villa within the countryside with a knife in her hand.

That’s the story. She is radical in that she doesn’t topic her concepts to chance testing, as within the illustration of Jenny’s violent outbursts, which culminate in her beating up a police officer for capturing an escaped circus lion. And it’s typical in a really German method as a result of it illustrates every little thing that isn’t on the tree on the rely of three. Not solely will we be taught that Omar’s arm was chopped off by terrorists, we see it too. We hear to each music that the singer Max Prosa composed for “15 Years” till the bitter finish, and we endure the present through which Jenny and Omar seem in a collection of scenes which might be embarrassingly well-intentioned and fail within the activity. to parody German tv the place it’s most embarrassing.

Hannah Herzsprung, whose profession started with “Four Minutes,” rows by means of this narrative junk room like a swimmer between rapids, however even her overwhelming presence can’t stop the movie from working out of steam way back when Jenny and Gimmiemore (Albrecht Schuch) break up lastly face alone. What then follows, a homicide, a suicide, a dying from most cancers, a marriage, a bar scene, would have been sufficient as a closing twist for a number of scripts. For a movie like “15 Years” it’s nonetheless not sufficient. So a lot for brilliance.