Margarethe von Trotta’s latest screenplay and directorial effort is a portrait of Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann, a major figure in European modernist literature.
Bachmann was at the height of her fame and success when she met the Swiss writer Max Frisch in Paris in 1958. This was the beginning of a challenging relationship between the two writers that would eat away at Bachmann from within. The end of a relationship leads to a personal and literary crisis. Bachmann travels to the desert with her new boyfriend and slowly begins to regain her strength and get back on her feet.
The narrative is not chronological, but moves non-linearly between the author’s different cities, Berlin, Zurich and Rome, and her states of mind before and after the crisis. The pieces form an overall picture of a woman, emancipated and respected but vulnerable, who believes that fascism is not dead, but lives on in human relations, especially between men and women.
The film is an interesting new chapter in the director’s series of historically significant portraits of women. Von Trotta and Vicky Krieps, with her sensitive interpretation of Bachmann, bring to the screen a modern thinking woman who lives her moments of hope and despair powerfully and for whom language and expression are everything.
Kaisu Isto