On of Germany's bravest filmmakers did it once again. "Eden" is a film with a cast, with a camera, with a sound like never before. Wee see a very fat genius of a cook and a quite lonesome mother. She falls in love with the cook's... art. A tricky relationship, intensely captured with a lot of close ups, painful, funny, it celebrates the beauty of life in a way you won't expect. And you won't expect the brilliant former Music-TV-Legend Charlotte Roche to give a perfect performance in her first leading role. In fact it's a pain to see her, pretending to be a waitress in the first minutes of the film. You don't believe a word. You feel high stakes and great pressure but if you're patient she'll convince you the more she gets quiet, the more she's herself (or the way we know her way of talking from TV-shows and fabulous interviews). You'll be irritated, maybe disappointed at first, but she gives you precious looks which you have never seen before on screen. She's of course not the "cracked actor" David Bowie sung about, in fact, she's not an actress (yet?) BUT it's a hard part, just to BE in front of a camera, it's a rare beauty to see people thinking and feeling on a screen. And you can see her thinking, feeling in "Eden". She's the "Cracked Actor" in Leonard Cohen's sense who once wrote "There's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in". Charlotte Roche is the crack in "Eden". After "Sophieee!", Hofmann's radical film about panic, this is an intense work about different shades of happiness and joy. Thanks so much for having the courage to fail, this movie didn't fail at all.
