Feriengewitter: a review

Dani (Étienne Charle) and Lucie (Sandra Puhlmann) in Feriengewitter

East German cinema is something of a new field for me, but if films like Eine Liebe in Deutschland and Feriengewitter are representative, it’s one I’m happy to continue exploring. The East German film Feriengewitter (Holiday Storm), directed by Karola Hattop, is a fun little made-for-TV family movie that’s two parts The Parent Trap and one part National Lampoon’s Vacation, with an 80s Europop soundtrack and a bit of seasoning from To Kill a Mockingbird. This sounds like a combination that shouldn’t work, but somehow it does. Feriengewitter somehow manages its disparate slapstick / screwball comedic elements, its family-drama secrets and its urban-rural tensions with a deft hand and a subtle sensitivity.

Basically, the film starts with a Berlin family in crisis. Peter and Rosi, a middle-aged couple, bicker with each other whenever their son Dani isn’t in the room. They’re tired of each other and want to get a divorce, but Peter doesn’t want to spring the news on Dani at the start of the summer holiday. Instead, they’ll wait it out until after their holiday is over before signing the papers. On a suggestion from Dani, they decide to visit the far southeast—the Elbe Sandstone Mountains on the border with Czechoslovakia—for a road trip over their holiday. However, while in the village, Dani meets a cheeky, precocious, cigarette-smoking, gum-chewing tomboy named Lucie, who immediately strikes his interest. In his attempts to impress and befriend Lucie, he ends up accidentally discovering his parents’ plan to divorce. And then there’s the weird old forester who lives alone out in the woods outside the village, who also supposedly keeps a mummy of his dead wife in the attic…

Feriengewitter at first looks like it’s going to be something of a bildungsroman for Dani: a boy going out into the world, meeting his first crush, going on adventures in the countryside, eventually asserting his agency and deciding where and how he will live in the face of his parents’ divorce. And to be truthful: there is a lot of that bildungsroman in here. In between taking stupid dares bull-baiting, trespassing in the old forester’s house and downing half a bottle of honey schnapps (with the inevitable consequences the next morning), Dani does develop as a character, attempts to find his own place in the world, attempts to take responsibility for himself and the people he cares about. Lucie, despite her reputation as the ‘horror of the agricultural commune’, ends up advising him and encouraging him throughout, and also asserting her own preferences; this is, in a more limited way, a growth-story for her as well.

But ultimately, it’s the parents who are faced with the decision to grow up. Dani and Lucie are the ones who seem to hold the most functional moral compasses in the film. Peter and Rosi, on the other hand, find themselves at pains to justify their decision to split—not just to Dani, but even to each other and to themselves. We get hints that both of them are half-heartedly trying to start affairs behind each other’s backs, even though neither of them really likes their new flings as much as they like each other. And even their arguments and attempts to hide the truth from Dani have a ring of falsity to them. Thankfully, the film does end up allowing Peter and Rosi to sit down and talk to each other rather than at each other—even though it’s an understated scene, it’s nonetheless quite emotionally impactful.

The film’s pretty clearly a low-rent production. The limited-range cinematography, lighting effects, the sound quality (some of the dialogue is close to inaudible), the Vermona keyboard soundtrack, the animated cartoon lightning-bolts, both the urban and the rural set pieces—all of them scream ‘made for TV’ and ‘bottle-cap budget’. But despite its limitations, Feriengewitter more than makes up in heart what it lacks in technical effects.

Indeed, one of the reasons that the film works so well is that the acting is so convincing. Étienne Charle’s subtle expressions—from smile to sulk to scoff to stare—make his Dani instantly believable as a pubescent boy who tries to navigate his parents’ estrangement and immanent divorce at the same time as he sorts out his own first explorations into romantic affection with Lucie. Acting opposite him, Sandra Puhlmann easily holds her own with an irrepressible, plucky, foul-mouthed charm. And even the tired, squabbling parents, played by Joachim Lätsch and Bärbel Röhl, handle their roles well, such that we can believe that there’s still chemistry between them even though they say they’re at quits. It’s rare even today to see actors of this age handle so deftly a script which crams this degree of emotional complexity into a ninety-minute runtime.

There are too many TV shows and movies nowadays, both in America and elsewhere, which glamourise or trivialise divorce: which sympathise with the adults over the kids; which treat individual desire, emotional and physical gratification as the natural goods which should be served by marriage, rather than any sort of common whole; and which treat marriage as completely soluble when those goods are not served to one spouse’s satisfaction. Feriengewitter shows us, in ways both subtle and overt, the seriousness of the impact on the kids, as well as on the adults—as Peter and Rosi look over old photographs of themselves with Dani on the dining-room table at their flat in Berlin, for example. It’s also a film that doesn’t patronise or sugarcoat childhood. With the foregoing caveat that I’m evaluating Feriengewitter at a remove both in cultural and physical space (an American watching a German film) and in time (an adult in the 2020s watching a kids’ film from the 1980s), it’s still somewhat refreshing to see a film made for kids that portrays tweens and early teens fighting, cussing, smoking cigarettes, swilling hard liquor, getting revenge and doing stupid life-threatening stunts to impress each other… without approving of it, and also without using a sledgehammer to moralise over it.

Watching it today, though, I can imagine a good part of Feriengewitter’s appeal would come from its Ostalgie value. The East German kids who would have grown up watching this movie on television would be probably five to ten years older than I am, and I can well imagine it has the same value to them that kids’ TV shows from the 1990s (like Ghostwriter) have for me. Considering even this factor, though, objectively I still think this is very much a solid film with a well-crafted script. I very much recommend it.