In theory, if you believe all the songs and movies and books and lore draped in fire-lit scenes and flickeringly colourful lights, Christmas is supposed to be nothing but idyllic fun, a warm glow of stepped-from-the-everyday contented happiness that follows you from eggnog-sipping to present opening, from carolling out in the snow to sleigh rides out in the countryside.
And honestly who wouldn’t want that? It all sounds pretty perfect and a million miles away from the banality and bucolic-free surrounds of commuting and bill paying and that sneaking sense that maybe life hasn’t quite worked out the way you planned.
You get the feeling as Bastian (Luke Mockridge), protagonist of Over Christmas (ÜberWeihnachten), gets ready to leave Berlin for a family Christmas in the much smaller but picturesque town of Eifel that he’s well and truly ready to buy into that shimmering, sometimes mirage-like ideal.
He works in a call centre that looks like a sleek, white battery hen farm, he has just walked out on his audition to be a songwriter for a big recording company because of crippling internal doubts, and worst of all, his girlfriend of many years, Fine (Cristina do Rego) has walked out on him not even a year earlier, recently enough that he is still reduced to sobbing agony at the thought of her. (One of the recurrent visual gags in the three-episode limited series is Bastian telling everyone who asks that he’s fine, a grim smile on his face, while we then see him crying his eyes out.)
If anyone needs all the escapist loveliness of a perfect Christmas, it’s Bastian, and he’s likely to get it with a family who are tight and loving – mum and dad Brigitte and Walter (Johanna Gastdorf and Rudolf Kowalski respectively) and brother Niklas (Lucas Reiber) – and who, he admits, don’t fight or make an emotional mess of the day.
His mum is devoted to her festive traditions and goes all out, and while Walter may not be as enamoured of the season, he loves his wife and goes along with whatever it is she wants to do to make Christmas special.
Expecting to walk into his family’s archetypal Christmas, Bastian is shocked when he arrives and finds out that Niklas and Fine are together – surprise! Niklas has called to warn him but Bastian ignored his calls – just the first of more than a few shocks and secrets in a family, and a town, that has well and truly can its soap operatic Christmas emotionalism game going strong.
While Over Christmas (ÜberWeihnachten) isn’t a perfect slice of festive storytelling, it does have quite a lot going for it.
Visually, the show delights in contrasting what Bastian is actually saying or doing with what he is feeling inside which is, of course, the “I’m fine” versus toilet wailing scenes come in and where we see him running after his brother in a Christmas tree forest with a roaring chainsaw when in face he’s meekly sitting in the car next to Niklas.
It’s a neat, if not particularly original, way of contrasting social nicety with grinding inner reality, and Over Christmas (ÜberWeihnachten) uses it to retrained good effect, so well in fact that when they stop employing it, it takes you a few seconds to realise that what we’re seeing now is what Bastian, or others, are really feeling.
In other words, as the story gathers pace, what was inside is increasingly leaking out and the dynamics of this once-perfect Christmas-ing family erupt into all kinds of chaos as Bastian has to grapple with the fact that people have a lot of secrets around him, often for good reason, and that maybe he isn’t quite mature to handle them.
Despite the gathering realisation that maybe the reason his life back in Berlin is so lacklustre is because he’s not exactly bringing his A-game to the table, there are some sweet moments such as when some drunken kissing at a bar when he’s out with his old bandmates – Ingo (Eugen Bauder) and Hagen (Jonathan Kwesi Aikins) – with his brother’s old teenage girlfriend, now the town’s baker Karina (Seyneb Saleh), turns it something unexpectedly profound that might take a sizeable sting out of his recent romantic woes.
His interactions with his mum too, who is as ebullient and sociable as his father is gruffly taciturn, are delightful although it soon becomes clear that maybe keeping the effusive mothering going well into his adulthood hasn’t done Bastian, not exactly maturity personified, any real favours.
Still, this is about one imperfect man in a loving but imperfect family discovering that maybe life is a good deal more complicated and requires a lot more work, that he previously gave it credit for, and that if he wants to be in on all the secrets and the emotional ins and outs of those around him, that he needs to step up and do something about it.
Though Over Christmas (ÜberWeihnachten) does stumble a little at the end at its tries to hurriedly have its big festive public reckoning with its intimate connections with those he has wronged from his dad to his mum and Niklas, friends Hagen and Ingo and yes, even the lovely, feisty Karina, it does mostly balance the comedy and drama, all set against a quintessential Christmas backdrop of trees, goose and lavish decorations in a postcard-perfect town, and is thoroughly likeable throughout, deftly employing visual and musical flourishes to lightly evocative effect while drawing good performances from its cast who neatly reflect the fact that the Christmas we want is not always the Christmas we get and that maybe that’s okay if you take the time to really get to know those around you and let a little reality and some sage lessons seep into your festive proceedings.