Nobody watches a Christmas series in which everyone loves each other. In the ARD four-parter “The Festival of Love” things get so out of hand on Christmas Eve that it is pure joy for the viewer.
The ensemble film “Wellness for Couples”, the couples therapy comedy “Kranitz – Get your money back if you break up” or the six-part film “The Funeral”: director, author and actor Jan Georg Schütte has now made a name for himself on German television with his very own approach . In his productions, the actors are not given a fully formulated script, but only the plot and the character of the role. This leaves plenty of room for improvisation – and leads to astonishing results in the works of the film artist, who was born in Oldenburg in 1962.
With this method, Schütte achieves something that he misses on TV: “I have the feeling that there is so much paper crackling on German television,” he told the last year star. “It’s rarely possible to make truly lively television where you have the feeling that the dialogues are all created in the moment.” In the best case scenario, small film miracles are created, such as “Altersglühen – Speed Dating for Seniors,” which won the Grimme Prize in 2015, or the productions mentioned above.
Jan Georg Schütte’s universe is growing
There is now a new trend to be observed in Schütte’s oeuvre: his works are merging with each other, the universe is growing together. Characters from one series appear in another. This year it started with the contract killer Ivan Meierle (Aleksandar Jovanovic), known from “The Funeral”, who had a short appearance in “Kranitz”. IV-Jan-Georg-Schhütte 21.02
The four-part Christmas series “The Festival of Love” goes one step further: It is a kind of spin-off from “The Funeral”. The Mecklenburg entrepreneur Wolff-Dieter Meurer was buried there. His sons Mario (Charly Hübner) and Thorsten Meurer (Devid Striesow) go on Christmas Eve together with niece Jäcky (Luise von Finckh) on the way to Swabia, where her sister Sabine (Claudia Michelsen) married into an industrial family and lives in a castle.
However, nothing comes of the hoped-for contemplative evening: On the one hand, the shirt-sleeved Ossis don’t really want to fit in with the fine family around Alexander Streuble (Oliver Wnuk) and his parents Elisabeth (Nicole Heesters) and Karl-Eduard (Wolf-Dietrich Sprenger). The argument finally escalates over a stolen muff – and then the two daughters of the arguing families, Jäcki and Simone (Lena Klenke), deceive one kidnapping before. The evening threatens to escalate completely.
An over-sweetened Christmas story
Anyone with the work of Jan Georg Schütte is familiar, will find a lot of familiarity here and will enjoy the improvisation of the high-class ensemble of actors. But the somewhat absurd plot involving a fake kidnapping robs this four-parter of the greatest strength of his previous works: credibility and realism.
So “The Festival of Love” has become a somewhat sugar-coated Christmas story, which at least alerts the viewer to the impending catastrophes on his own Christmas Eve prepared.
ARD will show the four episodes of “The Festival of Love” one after the other on December 23rd from 5:15 p.m. The series is already available in the ARD media library.