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BaftaBaby 
"Always entranced by cinema."
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 Posted - 12/14/2012 : 21:56:19
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Watch out for multi-award winner Karl Markovics - you're going to hear lots more from him. This highly experienced Viennese actor has made his writer/director debut with a film that completely understands how to tell cinema stories.
First of all, there's a minimum of dialogue so you're engaged viscerally from the start. The choice is appropriate, too, because the main character [played almost miraculously well by first-timer Thomas Schubert] has lived a predominantly institutionalized life where one speaks when spoken to.
It also allows Markovics to tell us only what we need to know when we need to know it. This has the effect of first casting ourselves as observers clothed in preconceptions, and ends with our caring about Schubert almost as a friend.
Markovics' framing sometimes takes your breath away it's so precise, so exquisite. No better example of which is the film's poster which features a shot of a young man in swimming trunks [Schubert] resting on the bottom of a pool, eyes closed. Dangling above his head are about six pairs of legs visible from the knees down and reflecting the image back on itself. It looks as though a multi-legged monster, no torso or head, is guarding an inert body.
Since we know that Schubert is working in a mortuary the scene resonates powerfully. It comes shortly after we learn why he was raised outside a family - revealed by the person who'd know.
He's taken such bizarre employment in preparation for a hearing which will either allow him his freedom from the juvenile detention center he currently inhabits, or send him back for yet more days of torturing himself with the conviction he's thoroughly inadequate ... not to mention how that's reinforced by the institutional torture that fuels the place.
There's not an iota of sentimentality in the film, yet you leave this young man full of such affection for him, and wishing him well.
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Breathing
