SMK-4

The premise for the film is the conflict that naming your child "Adolf" could cause in your family. That alone would not be enough to sustain a full feature film, and indeed this is only a starting point.

A whole host of family secrets are unraveled in the process, how they think about one another, what they have done in the past and present. It is like throwing a burning match into the store of a gunpowder fabric and making damn sure it stays alight. The result pushes their relations in way one might otherwise see in a Luis Bunuel film, just staying one step short of surrealism.

There are small hints here and there that this is French (rather than German) in its origin, and it may have been better (with a German cast) to adapt these subtle cultural differences to place this in a pure German setting.

Anyway, this is very entertaining for its witty dialogue. The after-the-party events that concluded the piece seemed unnecessary.

This is the kind of pretentious, self-indulgent, avantgarde art house cinema that killed attendance in German movie theatres at the time it came out.

It comes under the header of stage adaptation, but it retains a sense of staginess that inflicts upon you a feeling that you should be watching this in a theatre, not a movie theatre - except that I prefer root canal treatment over watching this any day in any form. A storyline may have existed at some point, but it is completely buried under a heap of surreal settings and over-the-top performances. The surrealism has no real function here, as it does not merely transcend reality, it disconnects from it. As a consequence, there are no identifiable characters either - the thing is just mystifying without sporting a mystery that keeps you interested.

Recremental bourgeois dross of this kind makes me envy China its cultural revolution.