Road movie
Comedy with depth: Berben and Król in “791 km”
Iris Berben (r) as Marianne and Nilam Farooq as Tiana in “791 km”: The two urgently need to get to Hamburg. photo
© -/PANTALEON Films/dpa
Five people in a taxi. In the road movie “791 km” stars like Iris Berben and Joachim Król show how exciting that can be. They seduce the audience into bursts of laughter and tears of emotion.
The story begins like a run-of-the-mill story (and is reminiscent of recent events): Storm in Munich. All trains are at a standstill. There are no planes on the road either. Four people really want to be in Hamburg the next morning.
With humor, persuasion and initially just a little charm, they get a man at the wheel of a taxi to drive them the 791 km to the Hanseatic city. It is predictable that they will grow closer over the long haul.
It is impossible to predict how this will happen. The screenwriter Gernot Gricksch (“Robert Zimmermann wonders about love”) and the director Tobi Baumann (“The Wixxer”), who also came up with the idea for the film, offer a few surprises. They delight with both their unpredictable story twists and their stylistic subtlety. The most beautiful thing is the change in the narrative tone from initially brutal comedy to a moving thoughtfulness.
Lies and truthfulness
The longer the journey lasts, the more weaknesses those involved reveal. Marianne (Iris Berben), a retired scientist, has to face a terrible truth. The couple Tiana (Nilam Farooq) and Philipp (Ben Münchow), who don’t seem very happy, have to admit that all their self-confidence is not real. The seemingly childlike and naive Susi (Lena Urzendowsky) learns that she should first stand up for herself before others can accept her. And the driver Joseph (Joachim Król) is forced to unpack a whole bag of life’s lies.
In some moments that are strongly heated by contradictory feelings, the comedy, which is humorous for a long time, achieves an astonishing veracity. For many in the audience, the tissue alarm may have been triggered several times. But it never gets cheesy. If this threatens, it is often counteracted with quiet, occasionally even hearty jokes. The production, which effectively balances comedy and tragedy, always manages to avoid the depths of threatening sentimentality.
Small means, big impact
In some scenes, Iris Berben manages to reconcile shimmering silliness and deep sadness in an astonishing way. It’s the small things that have a big impact, a silence here, a crooked smile there, a nervous hand gesture there. Everyone next to her is doing their best. Nobody overshoots in the game. Even when the humor sometimes seems superficial, a sensitive ambiguity appears. The entire ensemble acts with confident ease.
All participants seem to be able to create highly believable character drawings in no time at all. That’s why there are no seemingly imagined types acting. You can experience people with smaller and larger problems, with whom you would like to be at your side in order to help, but also in order to get help yourself. The truthfulness of the depictions means that many in the cinema, despite their participation in what is happening on the screen, also begin to think about their own existence.
Film site
With this film at the latest, Lena Urzendowsky belongs to the first guard of German cinema. The now 23-year-old Berliner has already shone several times as an outstanding character interpreter, for example in the television series “We Children from Bahnhof Zoo” that started in 2021 and most recently in the cinema in the lively fantasy comedy “Franky Five Star”. As Susi, she performs a daring tightrope walk between humor and tragedy and thus plays her way unforgettable into everyone’s hearts – on the screen and in the cinema.
– 791 km, Germany 2014, 103 min., FSK from 12, by Tobi Baumann, with Iris Berben, Joachim Król, Lena Urzendowsky, Nilam Farooq, Ben Münchow.
791 KM