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Agnes und seine Brüder – Weird Family Life Reduxed
By Dorothea Holloway | August 13, 2008
In Oskar Roehler’s melodrama, Agnes und seine Brüder (Agnes and His Brothers) (2004), the focus is on three entirely different brothers who have something in common: they all had suffered under a dominating father who, it was said, abused one of his sons in childhood.
This burnt-out, wasted, egotistical, “old hippie” father, played by Vadim Glowna with long white hair, is a wonderfully unsympathetic figure. All three sons have a tic: each has a problem with sexuality and suffers from a neurosis – sometimes pretty bad, sometimes not so bad. Sexual obsessions alone are not all that exciting. What makes for a fascinating story is the way the three actors play their roles, assured and unsurpassed.
Oskar Roehler is an actor’s director! He allows his actors space to develop their characters. And then the unexpected happens: the actors are no longer “types”! None fits that tried-and-true mold so cherished by film and television commissioners, a mold that reduces actors to hollow imitations of life. Have you ever seen on the screen such a drastic performance by Herbert Knauf in the role of the older brother Werner? With total abandonment the Green careerist bends over and craps in his own office – because the call of nature comes right when he’s on the phone with “Joschka”! Try as he may, deadhead Werner can’t even raise a spark of interest in his wife, so he takes out his frustration on the family grill!
Marvelous, too, the performance of Moritz Bleibtreu as the shy, sexually obsessed Hans-Jörg, the research-librarian at the university who can barely concentrate on his work when the girls are around. And all praise to Martin Weiss as the angelic Agnes, the transsexual go-go-queen who meanders like a sleepwalker through her song-and-dance nightclub routine. Both are suffering, vulnerable creatures, who, shrill as they are, nonetheless sympathetic. We watch how the voyeur Hans-Jörg, to satisfy his drive, grandly maneuvers his way, carefully yet fearfully, close to the women’s toilet – until the moment comes when he can back into the toilet in a flash without being seen! And we are moved when Agnes, a beauty with grace and charm, looks death square in the face – like a fairy, an ethereal apparition.
Agnes and His Brothers is a film without cliches, although one must admit that often a cliche is but a step away from reality. All three brothers are searching for a share of happiness, all want to be loved. The librarian Hans-Jörg eventually does find bliss – he becomes a porn-star and finds in the porno ensemble his great love. A farce? Not in Oskar Roehler’s hands. More on the realistic side is Werner’s Spiesserfamilie, reminiscent of the free-wheeling life-style of the ’90s. Here we have an attractive, yet completely frigid housewife (Katja Riemann in a brilliant cameo) and her precocious teenaged son (Tom Schilling), the fruit of the ’68 revolution. The son, in the throes of puberty, delights in terrorizing his parents with his video camera: his best shot is when he catches his father squatting while on the phone with “Joschka” and, minus a mobile, can’t make it to the toilet.
Sad and funny at the same time, Agnes and His Brothers is a film that walks the tightwire between debonair kitsch and sophisticated absurdity. Oskar Roehler received for Agnes and His Brothers the Bavarian Film Prize for Best Screenplay. Bravo, Roehler and his team!
– Dorothea Moritz
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