Talking About the Weather (2022 | Germany | 89 minutes | Annika Pinske)
In her feature film debut, Annika Pinske (who previously worked as a creative assistant to Maren Ade during the production of Toni Erdmann) brings an insightful slice-of-life to the screen. Concerned with the intersecting identities of German woman, her nuanced portrait centers on a Clara (Anne Schäfer), a philosophy PhD candidate in Berlin who’s creating a “second act” for herself on the precipice of turning forty. She lives in a cool shared house with fellow students and artists, supports her thesis work by teaching seminar courses, and maneuvers her way through the complexities of an academic social life. Candid chats with her advisor about the challenges of being among the few women in the department, awkward interactions and embellished stories at faculty parties, and an ill-advised relationship with one of her students are among the juggling act of her bohemian and cosmopolitan life.
When she picks up her somewhat surly fifteen-year-old daughter, whose primary residence is with her ex-husband, for a weekend in the country to celebrate her working-class mother’s birthday, we get a sense of the contrast between her village upbringing in the former East Germany and the identity that she is working to craft for herself in the big city. Her relationship with her mother is friendly, but it is clear that their interests have sharply diverged. Having forged out to create a life of ideas, Clara resents the polite small talk of her hometown; her mother is proud of her ambitions but doesn’t understand them or know how to communicate with her daughter.
The film is driven more by observation and subtle performance than overriding plot, but Pinske captures the contradictions of a highly-specific micro-generation of Germans with delicate precision. Clara represents the tail end of a generation whose formative years were spent in a failing communist country with fewer luxuries and more struggles, yet who spent their young adulthoods at the front lines of re-integrating into a social democracy. Although she has lingering embarrassment about how her age and rural background distance her from her colleagues in the university, conversations with family and childhood friends are similarly distant. These episodes communicate the complexities of returning to a place where few people understand why you left or why it never felt like “home” in the first place. The concept is both general and familiar, but it’s one that Schäfer makes all her own.
Talking About The Weather played as part of SIFF’s Official Competition; it screens today at 12:30 pm and online through the duration of the festival.
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