THE BIG CHILL meets THE GRADUATE. What could have been? What might have been? Reunions can be exciting, frustrating, exhilarating, nostalgic, one life given over to practicality while another chases lost dreams. Set against the majestic landscape of the desert, three estranged friends and former band mates "celebrate" turning 30, carrying their hopes, unresolved wounds and intertwined romantic baggage, in this hysterically funny and poignant look at lost loves, forgotten dreams and missed opportunity of three young adults in the final stages of giving up their youth.
The subtitle of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s first feature, from 1965, “Only Violence Helps Where Violence Reigns,” suggests the fierce political program evoked by their rigorous aesthetic. The pretext of the film, set in Cologne, is Heinrich Böll’s novel “Billiards at Half Past Nine,” which they strip down to a handful of stark events and film with a confrontational angularity akin to Bartók’s music that adorns the soundtrack. The subtlest of cues accompany the story’s complex flashbacks. The middle-aged Robert Fähmel tells a young hotel bellhop of persecutions under the Third Reich; his elderly father, Heinrich, an architect famed for a local abbey, recalls the militarism of the First World War, when his wife, Johanna, incurred trouble for insulting the Kaiser. A third-generation Fähmel is considering architecture, just as the exiled brother of Robert’s late wife, returns, only to be met by their former torturer, now a West German official taking part in a celebratory parade of war veterans. Straub and Huillet make the layers of history live in the present tense, which they judge severely. The tamped-down acting and the spare, tense visual rhetoric suggest a state of moral crisis as well as the response—as much in style as in substance—that it demands.