After sublime revenge thriller Revanche, Austrian writer/director Götz Spielmann falls back to earth with Oktober November, a soap, a melodrama, call it what you will, but whether you like it or not, it’s a film with a chrome-like finish.
It hangs off the spectacular cheekbones of its star, Nora Waldstätten, an ice-maiden specialist giving us blasts of wintry chill in her portrayal of Sonja, a successful actor who’s headed back home where her dad is sick and her sister is conducting an illicit affair with the handsome local doctor who tends to the old man.
Here, in the bosom of her family, as dad shuffles towards his final days, old tensions re-emerge, secrets are divulged, chickens come home to roost, and the usual prophesies of the well oiled soap-opera screenplay are fulfilled, though Spielmann gets into his couple of hours what most TV soaps would parcel out over months.
There are so many scenes set up as dramatic oppositions – young and old, acting and reality, the favoured child and the less favoured, the one who left and the one who stayed – that you have to applaud the actors, Waldstätten, Ursula Strauss (who plays Verena, Sonja’s sister), Peter Simonischek (her father), Sebastian Koch (the hunky doctor), Johannes Zeiler (Verena’s neglected husband) for making it seem much more than an exercise in formal mechanics, which they do with performances that click-click-click along the ratchet, layering on the tension.
It’s the father’s heart attack that eventually provides the catalyst the film needs to propel it into its end stage and as dad refuses to take his meds, then takes his meds, then gets into the bed he’ll never leave – allowing Simonischeck to deliver a gruelling and protracted death scene – the sisters orbit around him and the doctor does his best to make the man comfortable.
Spielmann writes tight scenes that appear to reveal not very much at all but are pregnant with psychological possibility. Koch you’ll possibly know as the good East German in The Lives of Others, Simonischek was the big lumbering dad in Toni Erdmann, while Waldstätten is probably best known for her starring role in the TV show Murder by the Lake (aka Die Toten vom Bodensee) and Strauss was one of Spielmann’s excellent stars in Revanche.
It really is all about Sonja, though. Hers is the “journey”, she’s the one digging to excavate the past and come to terms with some aspects of herself that her sister finds unbearable – Sonja notices handsome doctor Andreas and starts flirting with him, for instance, because that’s what she does with all men, and Verena is powerless to intervene, since her affair with Andreas is a secret. Sonja also treats everything in life as an exercise in acting, and quite possibly always has done since she was a girl. This irritates the hell out of Verena, but why Sonja does this is the nub on which the story turns.
Outside, the Austrian scenery is astonishing and refreshing, while inside the half-closed Gasthaus where the family rattle around too emptily Spielmann films the old-fashioned interiors as reminders that there is history here – two little girls grew up together in this place and though the decor is the same the girls are not.
Don’t expect Revanche, which spun a web. There are twists here, but they are of a much more domestic and familiar sort. A small-scale family drama is not exactly an air-punching pizza-and-beer evening on the sofa but Spielmann gives us atmosphere, expectation and a rake of good performances and together they bring his drama to life.
Oktober November – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
