Der schöne Tag

I do NOT advocate and hesitate even calling attention to the idea of seeing A Fine Day by Thomas Arslan. This film appeals to a very small niche of viewers: the pretentious. This story of a day in the life of Deniz, a young, disenchanted Berliner and her myriad relational problems, is the kind of purposeless over-arty film that keeps most people away from film festivals. In classic German cinematic fashion, facial expressions are kept to a minimum, which is fine if it?s still stimulating your brain or heart, which it is not. This is just people breaking up and thinking about breaking up. That is it; no revelations, no intricacies, and probably about twenty of the approximately eighty minutes look suspiciously like a mass transit advertisement, culminating in this ridiculous train scene: 1: She looks. He looks. Their gazes lock for an intense moment before breaking. 2: He looks. She looks. Their gazes lock for an intense moment before breaking. 3: Repeat steps 1 through 2, four or five times at least. There is some merit along the lines of exploring emotional expectations in breaking up, but that is about it. Of course, the thing could be brilliantly ironic because of its lack of expected emotion? but I would not bet on it.

For me, this film is a brilliant little discourse on love and film. It shows the small, but important issues of daily life - as falling in love, looking, wandering the city. As such, it takes you on a philosophical journey, through which the director makes you wonder about the different ways in which we are looking at others (your lover, your family, a stranger) and at film. The director reflects on the film medium itself and on how film represents reality and affects us doing so. A film that also installs a strange, distorted sense of time. The photography and the editing are very well done, but the acting could have been a little more vivid, I think.