"My taste tends towards blonde, my experience speaks against it." This much we learn from Jakob Fabian before the movie has even really opened its eyes. A short time later, the young man is already hopelessly in love and, you guessed it, long since lost. But even though Dominik Graf's adaptation of the novel about the moralist and urban flaneur, from whose perspective Erich Kästner described the moral and spiritual decline of modern society in 1931, is often fast-paced, Fabian also stops again and again, taking time to linger and see things differently: Multiple images, archive footage, silent film, digital and Super 8 optics unabashedly intertwine, merge and repel each other. Tom Schilling, who wanders through the wicked nocturnal Berlin of the Weimar years, seems like a man between yesterday, today and tomorrow, always curious, but also skeptical as to whether this world has a "talent for decency".
Bildrausch Honorary Award winner Dominik Graf, the great stylist and non-conformist in German cinema, not only lets his characters speak with Kästner, but lets them live completely in a film that is as stormy, as passionate, as unpredictable as the time in which it is set. pj
