Unabashedly sporting the most inauspicious of titles, a three-hour running time and a logline that features terminally ill elders and self-destructive descendants, German feature Dying (Sterben) looks like a hard sell on paper. And yet writer-director Matthias Glasner’s crisscrossing family drama manages to be exceedingly funny, often in some of its darkest moments, as well as expectedly sad.
Anchored by a nuanced, detailed performance by Lars Eidinger as Tom, an orchestra conductor juggling all manner of personal and professional commitments, and pitch-perfect turns by Corinna Harfouch, Lilith Stangenberg and Ronald Zehrfeld as the rest of his combustible nuclear family, this richly rewards the time investment it requires. Sure, a few trims here and there wouldn’t have necessarily ruined it, and some might suggest this could work better as a multi-part limited series for upscale TV.
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Dying
But it’s hard to imagine watching the musical performance set pieces anywhere but in a cinema given how integral the notion of an audience is to the story. In the script, the characters talk about that fine line between authenticity and kitsch that can only be achieved when everything is balanced just right, so that the work of art is true to the artist’s vision but simple and clear enough that an audience can easily comprehend it. In the cinema full of press and industry folk in Berlin, which is where I saw the movie, you could certainly feel that Glasner and his collaborators walked that line with exceptional grace. In fact, just when the key, climactic musical performance concluded, it felt like everyone in the room had slowed their breathing down just enough to let the silence ring.
The opening minutes, however, couldn’t be more different than that transcendent note of rapture. Dying starts with Tom’s mother Lissy Lunies (Harfouch) crumbled on the floor, covered in her own feces, and fielding a phone call from a neighbor informing her that her husband, Gerd (Hans-Uwe Bauer), is wandering around outside naked from the waist down. Gerd, we learn, has Parkinson’s and advanced dementia, while Lissy has cancer and an assortment of other illnesses, including near blindness, caused by diabetes. The first “chapter” of the film — there are intertitles separating segments, strengthening the novelistic vibe — follows these two as their conditions continue to worsen, and Gerd is put into a nursing home.
A phone call between Tom and Lissy we hear and see in the first scene from her point of view plays out again in the next chapter that centers around Tom, a good enough son who wants to help his parents but is struggling with his own problems too. For a starter, his ex-girlfriend Liv (Anna Bederke), for whom he still carries a torch, has just had a baby fathered by another man — except it’s Tom she wanted to be there during the birth and with whom she wants to co-parent the child, even though they’re not back together as lovers. For sex, he has a thing going on with his assistant Ronja (Saskia Rosendahl), but really most of his energy is going into the baby and rehearsing a new orchestral composition called Dying (Sterben in German, hence the film title), written by his friend Bernard (Robert Gwisdek), a depressive who has long maintained that he plans to kill himself someday.
As the film progresses, Bernard keeps re-writing his masterwork. For example, he insists that the choir, which makes the first pass of the music we get to hear sound so sweet, is too sentimental a component and “kitsch,” so it has to go. The orchestra of young musicians, many of them seemingly playing themselves, send Bernard into a spiral of despair when they tell them honestly that parts of the composition are too long or dull, critiques he had goaded them into giving him with a shouty display of histrionics.
Brutally honest opinions and admissions become a distinct theme throughout, cropping up later in an astonishing scene in which Lissy confesses to Tom that she never really liked him because he cried so much as a baby, and that she lived in fear for years that he would be damaged from a time when she dropped him as an infant. She might have thrown him, actually. Either way, she doesn’t love him and he tearfully absorbs this revelation, realizing that there is an icy coldness in him, too, which is his real inheritance from his mother, not the musical skills she always imagined were her legacy.
Permit me to again summon how this played at the press screening: Half the audience were howling at this scene, delighted by the cruel comedy; half were sitting in stunned silence, observing the profound pain both characters were in. Out of all the film’s many achievements, perhaps the most impressive is the ability to keep the tone balanced just on this biting point between tragedy and comedy in scene after scene.
That skill is also on display in the section that revolves around Ellen (Stangenberg), Tom’s younger sister and the one Lissy says she never found hard to love. Ellen also inherited some musical ability from her mother. She sings beautifully in a fried, sultry torch-singer way, especially when she croons along to a gem of a folk tune called “Garden Song” by Bill Fay, for instance. (All the music in the film, from the soundtrack cuts to Bernard’s compositions, are ace.) But unlike the people-pleasing, publicly successful Tom, Ellen chose to pursue a career that would guarantee people wouldn’t like her: dentistry. She became a hygienist assistant in a downmarket dental practice where she starts an affair with a married dentist, Sebastian (Zerhfeld).
Unfortunately, their relationship is entirely built on the frenzy of Ellen’s alcoholism. Vulnerable because of her carelessness (and blackouts) to waking up in, say, Latvia for no clear reason, Ellen is perpetually teetering through life on high heels with a face full of smeared make-up or, just as frequently, blood and bruises. She is the very walking definition of a hot mess. And in her own way, like most addicts, she is effectively committing suicide whether she’s conscious of it or not through self-destructive behavior, not really any different than Bernard.
In a director’s statement, Glasner (whose previous features include The Free Will and Sexy Sadie) describes how he started writing the film after the birth of his own first child, haunted by his own dead parents. Clearly, there is a hefty wodge of autobiography in here, probably filtered through creative license and pure invention to create a script that has a tight dramatic unity. While very grounded in the worlds of Berlin’s classical music scene and suburban German life beyond the capital, the traumas and milder tribulations seen here will be recognizable to a certain kind of filmgoer anywhere, but especially ones in middle age facing their own mortality and that of their immediate family. Really, who among us doesn’t relate to the high-low comedy of a funeral being interrupted because one of the bereaved family members has called to say he can’t make it since the electric car he hired has run out of charge? Dying, and Dying, is full of sly little jokes like this, which make life all the more amusing and bearable for the living.
