Everything is fake, everything is real and correct. The panoramas and views of industrial plants, pits, and smoking chimneys do not exist as such. They are combined and (re-)constructed – by the Montier-Union Winkelmann. Smoke is billowing from the coking plant, burning fire-red in the steelworks, clouding the sky over the Ruhr and Emscher. Milk and coal – white and black: The milk bottle is raised to wash down the coal dust when the miners come up from their shift.
Underground. A man in the dark. Only the pit light on his helmet shines. You can hear the heavy breathing. The jackhammer is drilling into the rock. Soon, a lot of coal will be blasted. Cut: A boy rummages in the bathroom cabinet between Lux soap and Echt Kölnisch Wasser. He wears short lederhosen with an edelweiss emblem. Outside, a woman in an apron hangs laundry on the line – not far from the winding tower. The film switches from color to black and white, as we know it from Edgar Reitz’s “Heimat” chronicle. The film also changes formats, going wide and then back again. Constant perspective variations.
Everything is there in this first adaptation of a novel by Ralf Rothmann: the working-class settlement with brownish-grey dirty facades, washrooms, kiosks, the green underbrush in front of the spoil heap in the background, preserving jars in the basement, the metal can for sandwiches. At noon, there’s a thawed block of spinach with a fried egg or Miracoli from the package. And when twelve-year-old Julian has done something wrong, there’s a beating from mother Liesel Senge with the wooden spoon. But the film does not stop at a lovingly unembellished, nostalgic home museum revue of 1960, which also includes the cast ensemble, led by Oscar Brose as sensitive, perceptive Julian Collien.
The summer holidays begin. Julian wanders around aimlessly, yet always on the lookout. He desperately wants to be part of the brutally ordinary, pubescent Kleekamp gang, yet does not. He feels uneasy with the landlord and neighbor Gorny (Peter Lohmeyer), who is awkwardly pedophilic towards Julian, and his lolita-like stepdaughter Marusha (Greta Sophie Schmidt), who lives in a room on the same floor as the Collien family and goes on a Sunday outing with father Walter (Charly Hübner says as much with his taciturn demeanor as with a lengthy monologue) and Julian to a colleague from the pit – a dalliance is the result.
These are just lightly tapped stories of growing up, of the pain and horror of recognition, which will encapsulate forever, of a child's desire that has no name, at most just an inkling, of men and women who do not question their roles. This milieu knows little about the psychological aspects and makes no fuss about it. Sexuality, in its prudish or crude, sometimes threatening form, is omnipresent, as is Catholicism with dull mass service and sultry confession, as well as the echoes of the war that shaped the men into who they are, who know little beyond their work and do not speak of themselves. We sense a closeness in which it can still be bright and warm at heart.
The screenplay by brothers Till and Nils Beckmann sticks closely to the novel, except for a terrible, highly symbolic episode borrowed from Rothmann's story "Alte Zwinger" – and with a crucial difference: In a second attack by his mother, Julian twists the spoon out of her hand and stops her once and for all from hitting him, which brings a narrow, patiently pinched smile, a tiny suppressed quiver of the mouth, stubborn pride, and feminine wisdom to the face of the wonderful Lina Beckmann. Julian wants to leave. His father says: "You can't run away, it'd be nice, but it’s not possible." Not yet. So they ride away together on a bike. Western heroes ride out this way. The tramp Chaplin wanders this way to the finale.
