Elementarteilchen

only if you are able to deal with its strong topic. It's about the meaninglessness of being depressed in an unsatisfying environment built up by oneself. Two brothers Michael and Bruno grow up with different characters and backgrounds. What keeps them together is the inability to create a stable life on their own what can be predominantly deduced on a lack of mother love or interest. I don't want to go into detail or present any spoilers. Therefor check out other reviews. What I really appreciate is the surprisingly good work of all actors who do great in this movie. Especcially Christian Ulmen (who needs little words to say a lot)knows how to present Michael's character so perfectly that it's really a pleasure to watch him on the screen. I also like the development of the plot. You don't know how the characters will develop and how their story will end. Both brothers are not changing in big steps within the movie but in the end you are surprised how far they have drifted from each other.

Just watch it yourself to make your own opinion but please don't expect it to be to entertaining.

This is a plodding, clueless adaptation of Michel Houellebecq's novel of the same name. It manages to include many of the book's dialogs verbatim, while completely missing its point. The main evidence is the outrageous change of the conclusion - the director just mined the novel for catchy phrases and totally refused to tackle its challenging ideas. Or rather he was not able to notice them. Even apart from that, the adaptation is dumb. One example: when Bruno describes to the psychiatrist the biological details of the decomposition of a human corpse, he uses lines that are there in the book, down to the moths with "the names of Italian starlets" - but they belong to the narrator, not to Bruno! Such knowledge is completely inappropriate for his character.

I don't mind the downplaying of the sex scenes - watch some porn if you have never seen it. The causality of the philosophy and culture of the times and the parents' lives on the lives of the main protagonists, the whole point of Michael's enigmatic life, the desperation of the obsession with sex and narcissism of the body, the sheer horror and cruelty of Bruno's existence, all this is downplayed to the point of absence. Houellebecq created a gripping world in his novel that you cannot shake off even if you think you know that he isn't right. The director produced a made-for-TV movie.

The Elementary Particles is a genuinely beautiful movie, well-shot and with several very powerful scenes; it also has two very strong lead performances. The first half is captivating and intriguing; unfortunately, that's where everything that's good about the film is. By the time the film was half-finished I was exhausted and felt like it was trying very hard to shock me. The real shame is that while the film feels like shock cinema, it actually deals with some very important and delicate issues - but it relies far too heavily on clichés and melodrama to allow for those to be taken seriously or create any real thought or debate. It's a self indulgent art piece that tries so hard to be artistic and tragic that it loses sight of what it actually wanted to say.

Elementary particles starts out as a quest for existence and what this word really means. Two brothers (half-brothers to be precise) realize their lives are not what kids dream about however much they seem to fit in the „mechanism". One is having doubts about his devotion to chase his scientific pioneering while the other does not seem to find comfort in teaching literature any more while being constantly turned down by publishers and neglected by his wife. They both have to reach back to their roots to be able to find out where to go from here, though Bruno (Moritz Bleibtrau) does so amidst rather compulsive circumstances, in a clinic he ends up in. They have not been given much of a head-start in life with their capricious, self-indulgent, impulsive and utterly careless hippie mother who left them both with their troubled and lonesome adolescence. Life has taken no mercy either – that is not the nature of things. Michael (Christian Ulmen) however, finds some inspiration to carry on in the shape of an old, more-than-friend girl pal, while Bruno has to rethink and reestablish his everyday needs and desires. He is living his second childhood – a time without constraints but full of uncertainty and odd, unbalanced characters – trying to escape his feeling of being redundant. Oscar Roehler's stark and thick drama seems a little exaggerating, a bit too much, nevertheless depicts life as it is: after stripped from all the fake Christmas wrappers, often desperate, pitiful at most times and forgiving only every once in a while.

Other reviews suggested this film was based on a French novel. If so, I have not read it and have no intention to. I watched this film strictly as a stand-alone entity, not knowing much about its background and its director, Oskar Roehler. I watched it out of a liking for international cinema, hoping I would land a good one. And I did.

One can argue this is a serious film, on a popular subject: love and its impact on life. Apart from some minor 'imperfections', e.g. the physical resemblance of the brothers played by different actors portraying them in youth and adulthood, with one done right and the other out of whack, I find the film was very well done and it commanded my attention throughout all its 112 minutes.

Perhaps it strikes a chord with intellectuals - one brother is a renowned physicist and the other an academic. It is a film that engages you and makes you think and try to get inside the minds of the protagonists, played as two half-brothers with entirely opposite life styles. One more likable than the other.

I enjoyed this film greatly, and regarded it one of the few, memorable German films I have seen in recent years.