Why actually, one asks oneself when one’s thoughts flee after a while while watching “Sweet Intoxication”, does the mafia not appear in it? Everything else is included in this wild adulteration: incest, murder, kidnapping, inheritance disputes, family strife, blackmail, alcoholism, domestic violence, hostile business takeovers, cancer. With such a deluge of earthly evils, omitting the mafia is almost discriminatory.
The ZDF two-parter “Sweet Frenzy” tells the story of the somewhat confusing Preus schnapps distillery dynasty in glossy images that never know which emotions they want to provoke: company boss Karl has a twin sister, Julia (Leslie Malton), and a wife (Désirée Nosbusch ), an ex-wife named Constanze (Suzanne von Borsody) and a mistress, as well as various children and children-in-law and nephews, a lawyer who married the ex-wife and a potential successor who would like to be part of the clan, but what not is, that is not. Karl does not survive the celebrations for his sixtieth birthday, and then the avalanche of disasters mentioned above picks up speed. Ricarda, the wife, refuses to treat her for cancer, Julia wants to go back to drinking herself instead of getting addiction counseling, and the children and grandchildren love and fight.
Great mischief needs to be created just as devotedly as great art
“Sweet Rush” feels like a bottle of fruit brandy on an empty stomach. Who is doing what here and why? Why is the family gathering on a snowy peak to discuss a hotel project that will never happen again? Why does the wife meet her lover on a suspension bridge? What is the function of a poorly written birthday song if in the next scene one of the characters makes fun of his misery?
It’s supposed to come across as self-deprecating, but it only has a smack of contempt for what you’re doing. “Sweet noise” should presumably be suitable for primetime at the same time and camp, kitsch that knows what it is and is so overloaded that it’s cool again. But Sabine Derflinger and her author Sathyan Ramesh didn’t love their project enough for that. Great mischief needs to be created just as devotedly as great art.
Exemplary scene for the lack of devotion: In an unnecessarily complicated and unmotivated twist, Constanze, the ex-wife, wants to be a painter. But investigative journalists have nothing better to do than to expose their gallery owner as a straw man hired by Karl Preus. Now, on a completely deserted street, you’re being ambushed by a TV crew from a “people magazine” specializing, it seems, in B-listers who hang out where the province is deep enough for deserted streets in broad daylight. The reporter’s first burning question that confronts Constanze: “What is art?” Not even Sarah Bernhardt could have played such nonsense in such a way that it was funny or witty or at least light-footed. But at least none of that lingers long enough for a hangover.
Sweet noise, ZDF, part one on Sunday 8:15 p.m., part two on Monday 8:15 p.m.