You can’t expect a film named Dying to make for a pleasant Sunday-afternoon diversion. And it does not. German director Matthias Glasner’s Dying is not for the emotionally weak. It is a unwavering unblinking look at mortality with no room for compassion, at least none that the characters of the Lunies family can spare for one another. And except for one friendly neighbour who helps out an old seriously ailing couple, no one is particularly likeable.When we first meet Lissy (Corinna Harfouch) and Gerd Lunies (Hans-Uwe Bauer) they are in serious need of help. They only have a nosy but kind neighbour to save them from dying. The couple is so infirm and frail that they are unable to look after one another. Dementia-ridden Gerd, who has a somewhat embarrassing propensity to walk around naked in his neighbourhood, has to be put in a old folks’ home after Lissy has a stroke/heart attack.ALSO READ: Elaha: Milena Aboyan Film Is A Gut-Wrenching Elegy To VirginityLissy seems more relieved than grieved after being separated from her lifelong partner. Yes, this is that kind of a film where disaffection is the key.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7o9OkStAAOA
Lissy and Gerd’s only son Tom (Lars Eidinger) is too busy with his absurdly uneven love life to bother with his mother’s anxious calls. The one occasion when he actually meets his parents is filmed with elegiac anxiety: Tom’s father is happy to see his son, but fails to realize that his wife, Tom’s mother Lissy is also in the room.The wretchedly dismaying mood of doom and unhappiness get progressively unbearable. In one sequence after Tom’s father’s death (Tom doesn’t attend the funeral) he tells his mother he has always hated her and loathes every minute spent with her and can’t wait to get out of their house.The mother’s expressions are more weary than shocked.Not for the first time I wondered if this family was dysfunctional or diss-functional: the characters seem to invite scorn and derision for their utterly self serving attitude.While the first movement chronicling the old couple’s frightening dereliction is emotionally compelling (though unsentimental), the second movement where we enter Tom’s muddled world is interesting only to Tom, if anyone at all. He is a music conductor by profession and a loser by nature. Tom has decided to own parental rights of a newly born baby whose father is someone else.At work, he has to deal with a perennially dissatisfied music partner Bernard (Robert Gwisdek) who thinks he is a misunderstood genius. The music students give him ‘whatever’ looks, though Bernard couldn’t care less, much like this film’s director who is lost in his own genius.The lengthy passages of symphonic overtures don’t seem to add up to anything except a growing sense of aimlessness in the narration that doesn’t echo life, but mock it.By the time we came to the third episode about Tom’s spaced-out sister (her first real sentence is, ‘Where am I?’) Ellen (Lilith Stangenberg) I was not too sure of what Ellen with her carnage of clichéd traumas really wanted in life. She is in a relationship with her boss Sebastian (Ronald Zehrfeld). But does she really care for anyone but herself? ALSO READ: Ru Is A Benign Drama About War MigrantsDo the children of this monstrously self serving family care for anything except their own appetite? Dying is a lengthy three-hour disembodied discourse on dying and existence. At the end of it , I was as numbed as the patient on Ellen’s dentist’s chair (she is a part-time dentist, besides being a full-time narcotics absorbent).Why is there so much negativity and nullity in the narration? And even if life sucks, do we need cinema to suck the life out of our viewing experience?
