The GDR chocolates from back then are finally being produced again, now, ten years after reunification. Teacher Gudrun Pfaff happily bites into the piece’s familiar past. “Wonderfully musty, just like before!” On her 60th birthday, she wants to share this childhood memory with her daughter Lara, who came back to the village from Berlin especially for the big party. However, Lara only looks at stepfather Werner with tortured helplessness: “I don’t like marzipan at all.”
As much as they are happy to see each other again, there is a problem between mother and daughter, and both revert to old roles. Gudrun is a control freak and wants to improve Lara’s birthday speech as if it were a school essay. Lara moved to the big city at an early age to break away from her supermother, because she continues to hide who her biological father is. Told patiently and carefully the actress Katharina Marie Schubert in her directorial debut “The Girl with the Golden Hands” about this ramified conflict, which causes deep-seated insults and a feeling of insecurity to circle around each other. In doing so, she oscillates with the movements of these identity negotiations between family constellations, overarching generational issues and the dilemma between East and West Germany, which is even more present in the country than in the city.
The mother has nothing but ridicule for her daughter’s life in reunified Berlin
Here in the provinces, the clocks have literally got stuck between the GDR past and the promises of reunification. Muff hangs on both sides, just the familiarity is gone. City dwellers are greeted with a sneer. Lara is now one of them, also for her mother. That’s why she keeps mocking her daughter for her cloakroom job at the Berlin Opera. The big career looks different for her. The fact that Lara made a name for herself as a writer passed her by. Again and again Lara looks longingly at her lovingly wrapped package – her first novel, just published, it should be a surprise. “I’ll take my time with the presents later,” says Gudrun, but peace never comes here.
She celebrates her birthday in the children’s home where she grew up, which is in need of renovation. However, the entire circle of friends has hidden from her that the mayor wants to sell the building to an investor. This nostalgic retreat is soon to be given a luxury makeover to boost the economy. That would also be a relief for the son of her friend Kathi, because he would finally have work again. Gudrun had just cobbled together small orders to help him. Now that it’s about her childhood memories, the support is over. She alienates friends and family at her party and flees. A bicycle accident forces her to pause for a moment and ultimately acts as a magnifying glass for all the emotions hidden behind her stubborn pragmatism. Corinna Harfouch wrestles with this rough and unwarm character nevertheless a brittle goodness that Birte Schnöink’s Lara works through with nervous perseverance.
That makes Gudrun accessible in all its awkwardness. For her, the constant upheaval has become a constant: born shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, raised in a children’s home in the GDR, she is now to grow old in reunified Germany, where voices of concern and information about the turn of the millennium are bubbling over the radio. The Millenium Bug could threaten all computers and throw the world into chaos. Meanwhile, Gudrun shrugs his shoulders and unpacks a C25, the big seller on the mobile phone market.
GDR chocolates, dual-band cell phones and Y2K, Schubert combines recognizable moments from East and West with a benevolently smiling lightness. All of these topics always resonate with the Pfaff family, but do not always push to the surface. In her screenplay, Schubert formally tames these perspectives, which are above all emotionally intertwined, in three chapters. Otherwise, she lets the storylines develop freely, sometimes even resting, and in this informal rhythm strikes a tone that is completely free of clichés, because it is organic and human. It is precisely this simultaneity of feelings, sensitivities and everyday things that makes this mother-daughter duo so real beyond all the dramas of coming to terms with the past decades and comedies from the past. Schubert is looking for a benevolent cooperation on all levels, for which you don’t have to understand or even straighten everything out. It is often enough to give him the sincere feeling of being seen and taken seriously.
The girl with the golden hands, Germany 2021 – Written and directed by Katharina Marie Schubert. Camera: Barbu Bălăşoiu. With: With Corinna Harfouch, Birte Schnöink, Peter René Lüdicke, Jörg Schüttauf. Wild Bunch, 107 minutes. Theatrical release: February 17, 2021.