In her debut “Binge Living. Callcenter-Monologe” Stefanie Sargnagel wrote that her everyday life was completely screwed up again, that she urgently needed a script for her life. Eight years later there is even a whole film about her life in which she also plays the leading role, i.e. herself or the Sargnagel brand, which puts you in the mirror labyrinth, because what is real in a mockumentary, in which Hilde Dalik as she does not get the role of Stefanie Sargnagel, but instead is allowed to play her invented best friend as a consolation, a worn-out temporary waitress who looks extremely authentic in her existential discrepancy, would like to be an actress and at some point says to Sargnagel: ” I can’t even play myself. “
Forgiveness. Too confusing. Again from the beginning. Or better: from the outside. The Viennese directing team Sabine Hiebler and Gerhard Ertl supposedly originally wanted to make a feature film about Stefanie Sargnagel, but received no funding for it. So they submitted the whole thing in a slightly alienated documentary film and shortly afterwards had the budget, or rather the salad, because now they had to pretend they were making a documentary about the making of a feature film. They didn’t make much effort in their camouflage work, on the contrary, they invited all their Viennese culture and art friends to play, which is of course extremely meta, because that’s what it’s supposed to be about, the stupid art business and how it overheated itself with its Hypes revolves around itself.
In Austria, the last big hype was said coffin nail. For everyone who has spent the past few years under a stone: Stefanie Sargnagel began to tweet about everyday life in the call center and the nights in grindly warm Viennese pubs, which was so characteristically funny that it soon became so funny Publish their tweets glued together into books. Sargnagel himself summed up his characteristically peculiar way: “What gives me the most pleasure: shitting the truth in people’s faces with jokes.”
So now “Sargnagel – the film”, which will be shown this Wednesday at the Hof Film Festival. In the middle of it all she herself, with a permanently faded face, because basically it doesn’t matter. Uranium exhausting too. Absurd eh. Her “favorite answer to the question what I do was always: ‘Nothing at all'”, suddenly has reading lists and interview marathons, pressure to submit her manuscript and stress with right-wing hate tsunamis, which her manager is of course happy about , because “is going great anyway, the Shitstorm are built into the marketing at Rowohlt right away.”
The metaklamauk rages around them, a producer who has never read a line from Coffin Nail, but senses that there is some topic in it. The songwriter Voodoo Jürgens plays himself, the Viennese cultural advisor Veronica Kaup-Hasler is the beastly caretaker of the dark social housing block in which coffin nail lives and which could also provide the backdrop for the darkest Ulrich Seidl scenes. The actress Hilde Dalik absolutely wants to play the coffin nails because that is a role with which you can finally win prizes, but with her pinched ambition and her high-speed divas-fuss everyone on the pointer.
What gets out of sight: The coffin nail is not just crass and sloppy
Her silly friend, played by the actor and director Michael Ostrowski, is supposed to direct and in a scene that is extremely reminiscent of the Ibiza video, the producer, director and the brightly made-up Dalik think together which aspects of the fictional character coffin nail should be best seen outside just because it’s not too complex. That’s pretty funny, but in this celebration of superficiality, you lose sight of exactly what makes the coffin nails really interesting.
It is not only crass and sloppy, but also holds up a mirror to the ugly machismo with this unimpressed coarseness. You men still make your piggy flat jokes? Here you are, here are my sayings about menstrual clots. Together with friends, she founded the fraternity Hysteria, which wants to restrict the right to vote for men to protect men, demands a female and transgender quota of 80 percent in public offices and pulls off such a skilful parody of identity madness in the student wank that the right-wing populists Sargnagel are so glowing how helpless hate. And in her book “Fitness” she has shown that in times of self-perfection terror, total refusal in the form of falling down every evening with friends and lots of cans of beer can be a leisurely and sovereign political action.
All that is left out, instead, Sargnagel watches the latest voltes of the script with her stone face. Incidentally, Angela Merkel sometimes looks exactly like the coffin nails, in moments when she stands next to Putin, Johnson or one of the other ego clowns, ostentatiously does not make a face and seems to think: Ah go, are you stupid? Perhaps the coffin nail, now that she’s done with the film, should just go into politics, the conservatives urgently need new, young integration figures.
Coffin Nail – The Film, Austria 2021 – Direction and script: Gerhard Ertl, Sabine Hiebler. Camera: Anna Hawliczek, Carolina Steinbrecher. With Stefanie Sargnagel, Hilde Dalik. Golden Girls film production, 96 minutes.