‘Cicadas’ Review: Nina Hoss’ Second Go-Round With ‘The Audition’ Director Doesn’t Live Up to the Buzz
In “Cicadas,” top German actress Nina Hoss (who also serves as executive producer) reunites with filmmaker Ina Weisse, the director of her 2019 drama “The Audition,” in which she played a tightly wound woman whose life is unraveling. That same logline could also describe Weisse’s latest, where Hoss embodies 48-year-old Isabell, a high-end Berlin realtor who is trying to care for her aging parents at the same time that her childless marriage to a French engineer is falling apart. Meanwhile, she’s drawn to Anja (Saskia Rosendahl), a struggling single mother from the Brandenburg countryside where Isabell’s architect father built a striking modernist home. Playing out in several non-complementary registers and burdened with a lot of barely sketched-out backstory, “Cicadas” is more confounding than compelling.
The underlying theme of the movie is family relationships, with the duty that parents owe to their children and grown children to their parents, something that writer-director Weisse seems to particularly want the audience to ponder. She doubles down on the theme of family by casting her own parents, Rolf (an actual architect) and Inge (an art teacher), as Isabell’s father and mother. It works fine on the performance level, but given the film’s overall muddle, it makes the viewer wonder if Weisse might be using the film as therapy to work something out.
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From the opening moments, the film juxtaposes the family situations of Isabell and Anja. We see Anja calling for her wilful young daughter Greta (named only Greta in the credits) who has run off into the forest while a line of cars turns into the drive of a country estate. The cars carry Inge, Isabell, her father’s Polish carer, and Rolf, who has used a wheelchair since a stroke.
Rolf and Inge no longer have the ability to manage their country house. The windows leak, the gutters need cleaning, insects are making their way inside and, to make matters worse, Rolf has a hard time keeping a carer. Isabell favors selling the place, but Rolf stubbornly refuses. Even as a much-reduced figure, it’s apparent how much his wife and daughter are in thrall to him and cater to his every need. Just in case that’s not clear, Weisse offers a lot of oddly placed dialogue later in the film attesting to the fact.
In contrast to Isabell’s family, Anja is having a hard time making ends meet. After losing her job washing dishes in an industrial kitchen, she takes on other menial work at the local bowling alley where she has to fend off the attentions of the oddball manager Uwe (Thorsten Merten). While Anja works, the unkempt Greta wanders around unsupervised, following some slightly older boys who are up to no good.
Weisse keeps the relationship between Isabell and Anja deliberately ambiguous, letting it veer into psychodrama territory. Is there something about the needy Anja and her ragged child that the barren Isabell responds to? Is it sapphic? Or is it something more insidious, à la “Strangers on a Train” or “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” on the part of Anja, whom we have witnessed telling lies? All these options are intriguing, but none are fully explored, which makes the opaque, open ending even more disappointing.
Meanwhile, whenever Isabell’s narcissistic husband Philippe (Vincent Macaigne) is on screen, the film switches registers from drama to farce. From leaving Isabell at the airport and going on holiday without her, to arriving back in their Berlin home to grandly declare “Our life together is not what I dreamed it would be,” to interrupting Isabell’s intimate dinner with Anja by turning up at the country house post-prostate operation, complete with a colostomy bag, his performance seems to belong in a completely different movie. It is particularly bizarre when, prone on the couch, with his arm flung out as if he wants Anja to take his hand, he starts talking to her in English, asking “Are you attracted to her?” The look on Anja’s face mirrors the discomfort and disbelief that the audience feels.
The cutting also creates confusion. Working again with her “Audition” editor Hansj?rg Weissbrich, Weisse favors short scenes with no transitions and lots of ellipses. One minute the characters are in Berlin, the next they are in the countryside. Scenes that would benefit from more time to play out; the final one, and another in which Greta and the bad boys run riot inside Isabell’s country house are assembled in an unsatisfying manner.
Without as much to work with as she had in “The Audition,” Hoss is still watchable in the ambivalent blond role she could play in her sleep. Meanwhile, Rosendahl’s performance suffers from not having a clear character arc. Like so many other things in the picture, the title, “Cicadas” adds little to the overall drama.
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