Navel-gazing does not have the best reputation, it is associated with embarrassing celebrity confessions, narcissism or women’s sweaters that are too short. But alternative navel-gazing can also be enchanting, as in the new film by Sonja Heiss: A family spends a day at the beach and the seven-year-old son wants to delay the journey home as long as possible. “One more navel full, please,” he begs. The father allows it, and so, with the trembling hands of the child, sea water is filled into the round in the middle of the big daddy’s belly – until it evaporates, the son can continue playing. “Is there anything else?” he asks once. The father sticks his finger in his navel and says: “Yes, you still have time.”
With this childish thought souvenir begins “When will it finally be like it never was”; the film is based on the autobiographical book by Joachim Meyerhoff and has just premiered in the Generation section of the Berlinale. The actor is a memory worker on his own account, at the Burgtheater in Vienna he celebrated great success with stories from his childhood and youth. “All Dead Fly Up” was the name of this program and it was invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen in 2009. Meyerhoff later wrote it down in several books, each of which became a bestseller.
The reliability of memories is not far off, you know it yourself. Traveling in your mind to childhood is tedious, many things are completely gone, others are only based on stories. And the more often one speaks of particularly memorable experiences, the more life they take on. Joachim Meyerhoff is not immune to this either, he makes no secret of it: Inventing means remembering, he writes once and tells of a dead man he found behind a hedge on the way to school as a child. By making something up, appropriating the story and exaggerating it, he found the truth. So finally it became what it might never have been.
There are many stories like that of the dead man behind the hedge in both books and films. The structure of the template is episodic, the years pass, the author combines bizarre anecdotes with surefire punchlines. And death met young Meyerhoff early on, and not just behind the hedge. First he has to say goodbye to beloved pets, later to family members. As the son of a psychiatric director, he grew up on the premises of the largest child and adolescent psychiatric clinic in Schleswig-Holstein. He has no fear of contact with the patients, they are part of the family. Her screams at night calm him down, they celebrate birthdays together or stand guard when visiting politicians. He will even fall in love with a depressive patient who only eats bifi sausages.
One Christmas, the famous Laura Tonke cuts everything down
Sonja Heiss adopted a lot of this in her film, the episode structure and the dry humor suit her. You know that from her debut novel “Rimini” or the previous film “Hedi Schneider is stuck”, both of which also told of fragile family bonds and combined the comic with the tragic. Here she (together with the Belgian cameraman Manuel Dacosse) condenses and visualizes anecdotes into enchanting comedy numbers, leaving out other things – the crazy blood brotherhood with the family dog, for example.
At the same time, she describes the disintegration of the family: she turns a Christmas argument, which is only told in a few lines in the book, into a marital crisis with an electric knife. As the mother, the famous Laura Tonke sabers everything down, even the donor complete edition of the father (also strong: Devid Striesow) has to believe in it. As the story spans two decades, the child actors change over the years. The casting of the psychiatric patients is diverse.
When there is nothing left to laugh about at the end, when the parents’ marriage has finally broken down and several people are dead or terminally ill, the director strikes a new note. The parents’ beds, which were pushed further and further apart over the course of the film, are suddenly next to each other again. Then mother and son return to their old home. It’s no longer hilarious, it goes to the heart. And the family faces long-suppressed truths that are far more than mere navel-gazing.
When will it finally be like it never was, D 2023 – Director: Sonja Heiss. Screenplay: Sonja Heiss and Lars Hubrich, based on the novel by Joachim Meyerhoff. With: Laura Tonke, Devid Striesow, Arsseni Bultmann. Warner, 116 minutes. Theatrical release on February 23, 2023