IF THERE IS one film that should be deemed mandatory in this year’s European Film Festival in South Africa, it is unequivocally Matthias Glasner’s Dying. Clocking in at over three hours, this magnificent and complex piece of storytelling is beautiful and deep, tragic and empathetic, funny and politically incorrect, and it paints an understanding of family complexities and what it means to be an adult maker of art that hits home on so many levels. It is online for free until 20 October 2024.
The work is divided into five chapters, each presenting a different understanding of the characters and their position in the world. As the first opens and closes, you find yourself judging the adult son of an elderly couple in obvious medical distress.
The second opens from the perspective of the son, Tom (Lars Eidinger), and things become more difficult. Suddenly you know why Tom is not available for his mother (Corinna Harfouch). Suddenly you have an empathy that digresses from a knee-jerk norm. Suddenly that son has an existence and problems of his own that were not clear from the outset.
Suddenly you realise this is a tale that is not about what you imagined at first, at all, given the maudlin premises of dementia and the illnesses and loneliness of elderly folk. It’s a story about life, rather. And art, and the horror of bringing your work out into the public domain, which may be akin to that of birth: complex, messy, moving and with difficult promises in the future.
Dying is an essay about being in the world. And about how an empath and a narcissist can emerge from the union two adults who are at once needy individuals in their own rights, not bad people, but awful parents. It’s a tale about a pathological need to destroy a sibling’s project, as it is about a deep need to be heard.
Tom is an empath on every conceivable level. People see him coming along and they get ready, consciously or not, to use him in the most extraordinary of ways. They know he will not turn them down. They know he will not close the door on their brokenness. They don’t care about what shattered bits he carries. But he’s no pushover and his empathy illustrates him as a real friend who can find his own feet and musical path in the world, but who knows how to dance around even his narcissistic sibling, Ellen (Lilith Stangenberg), who opted to become a dental assistant, as far away from Tom’s status as a conductor, as she could.
A grand work of suicide and love, of years of unadulterated dislike and the tossing of guilt in a direction where it will be heard and felt, this work, like Alan Bleasdale’s 1995 series Jake’s Progress, operates like a Greek tragedy, bringing in the darkest of humour across a landscape of catastrophe, at a time of life when things are supposed to be simple.
It is an outrageously beautiful understanding of grown-up life in all its messiness, and in particular, the life choices of one who creates. Its length is completely justified and as it sucks you into its carefully constructed premises, you will relish each bit of it, that is violent and surprising, beautiful and tear-making, all at once. A masterwork in every dimension.
Dying is directed by Matthias Glasner and features a cast headed by Hans-Uwe Bauer, Anna Bederke, Tom Böttcher, Clara Aileen Bowen, Lars Eidinger, Sidney Fahlisch, Robert Gwisdek, Corinna Harfouch, Alina Hidic, Nico Hononics, Saerom Park, Saskia Rosendahl, Karmela Shako, Catherine Stoyan, Lilith Strangenberg, Rosa Thormeyer, Jens Weisser, Raphael Westermeier and Ronald Zehrfeld. Written by Matthias Glasner, it is produced by Matthias Glasner, Ulf Israel and Jan Krüger and features creative input by Lorenz Dangel (music), Jakub Beinarowicz (cinematography), Heike Gnida (editing), Lisa Stutzky (casting), Tamo Kunz (production design) and Sabine Keller (costumes). In German with English subtitles, it is part of the 11thEuropean Film Festival South Africa, and screens online for free on 20 October 2024.