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Talking About the Weather (Annika Pinske, 2022)
🕑 Added 2022-08-04 19:18:22 +0000 UTC
This is a graduation film from a student at Berlin's dffb, and judging from the information in the credits, she worked closely with Maren Ade. This was my primary reason for watching Talking About the Weather, and taken as a first film from a young maker, it's very promising. Pinske shows great flair in staging the kinds of interpersonal conflict that are familiar to any woman in the academy. Clara (Anne Schäfer) is finishing her dissertation on Hegel, and she is positioned between two senior figures in the department. Her mentor Margot (Judith Hofmann) decided to forgo getting married or having kids to concentrate on her career, and she is somewhat bitter at the choices she was forced to make. Meanwhile, she is spoken down to by the department's gray eminence (Hermann Beyer), who also happens to be the father of her grad-student boyfriend (Marcel Kohler).
In the second half of the film, we meet Clara's daughter Emma (Emma Frieda Brüggler), who lives with her dad and resents her mother's focus on her career. The two of them go to the sticks to visit Clara's mom (Anne-Kathrin Gummich), who has no concept of what her daughter does. During a birthday party for a relative, Clara is treated haughtily by the working class locals, who resent that a woman thought she was entitled to move to Berlin to study.
The whole thing truly writes itself, since I can attest that all the first-generation women academics I know, including my wife, have found themselves caught in this exact situation. Clara is looked down on by her peers at work, but at home she's resented because her choices somehow reflect badly on the community at large. If Talking About the Weather has a significant flaw, it's that Pinske meticulously reproduces this social dynamic without providing much insight into it. Like certain classic Mumblecore films, Talking confuses verisimilitude with integrity, asking little from its viewer aside from a knowing nod of approval. Still, considering that Pinske has just started out, this film bodes well for her future endeavors. The Berlin School lives on.
