‘Dying’ Review: Lars Eidinger Carries The Weight Of Matthias Glasner’s Deep And Darkly Funny Family Drama
19.02.2024 - 17:26
/ deadline.com
Lissy (Corinna Harfouch) is huddled on the floor in her nightgown, trying to ring her son. Her legs and nightgown are smeared brown with her regular nightly incontinence, but it is her husband who worries her: Gerd (Hans-Uwe Bauer) has wandered outside again, not sure where he is and wearing no pants. Her neighbor is at the door, insisting on being helpful, while Lissy just wants her to cut short this humiliation; has she spotted that even the phone is now daubed with excrement?
Old age ain’t no place for sissies, as Bette Davis famously said. The usual riposte is that it’s better than the alternative, but Matthias Glasner’s long, absorbing and intermittently very funny film calls that into question. Life, even before the debilities of age become its main feature, is the real difficulty.
Glasner’s story is a version of a traditional family saga, but deconstructed to become a series of overlapping chapters about the family’s component individuals. The fact is that Lissy, Gerd, son Tom and his sister Ellen clearly do not cohere as a family and, as a grimly humorous truth-telling session between Lissy and Tom will reveal, never really did. Lissy cares for Gerd equably enough, but when she has a heart attack and he is put into a care home, what shows on her face is her unspoken relief at being able to concentrate on her own ailments.
At that point, a new chapter is introduced that will center on Tom (Lars Eidinger), a junior orchestral conductor in a different city: he works in Berlin, while they are in Hamburg. Tom is officially unattached, but has undertaken to be a stand-in father to his former partner’s new baby. He is helping to deliver little Jessie at the precise moment his mother calls him.. “A pity it isn’t
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