(courtesy IMDb)
It’s not often that you emerge from a movie and wonder what on earth the point of it was.
Usually even the films you don’t quite love, or outright dislike, have a clearly defined reason for being and you can very easily reconcile with what you liked and didn’t like and why.
But after watching Cicadas (Zikaden), written and directed by Ina Weisse, and this is at a point almost 24 hours hence from when the credits rolled, this reviewer is still trying to figure out just what he saw and what it all means, if anything.
On paper, at least the film is fairly straightforward.
Two women, at vastly different stages of their life, and with divergent priorities that match where they have found themselves, get to know each other in Brandenburg, a rural part of Germany where the older of the two, architect Isabell (Nina Hoss), who is married to French engineer, Philipp (Vincent Macaigne), has a modernist rural retreat.
Isabell is at a massive inflection point in her life.
Her father, also an architect, has had a severe stroke, rendering him unable to look after himself, and placing pressure on Isabell who has to coordinate a revolving door of less-than-stellar carers, the needs of her ageing mother all while trying to cope with the fact her husband has just dumped her at the airport.
As in ended their relationship just as they’re about to board a flight, a cruelly impromptu act that leaves Isabell reeling and places her into the sort of existential flux that makes forming an unlikely friendship with local single mother, Anja (Saskia Rosendahl) who is struggling to hold down a job and raise her willful young daughter (Yvon Moltzen), possible.
There is some connection before this but it’s sparse and it’s only when Isabell, reeling from a traumatic life experience which is only revealed later when she and Philipp belatedly begin to talk, awkwardly and incompletely, has her entire world thrown into chaos that she’s open to getting to know someone she previously only nodded to or traded inconsequential lines of conversation.
So far, so slice-of-life nuanced, the kind of film which is happy to take things slowly, occupy the grounded, harsh reality of day-to-day life, where solutions aren’t easy and resolution is a slippery concept, and let things unfold in fairly naturalistic ways.
In that respect, Cicadas (Zikaden) is a quiet joy to sit through, even if it more than a little bleak, predisposed to substantial servings of life at its most trying and problematic, with few if any of the momentary scenes of levity and happy diversion.
There’s little if any of that, and while that kind of emotional balance isn’t necessarily mandatory in a film such as this, unremitting bleakness in a film that sits in slice-of-life territory can become a little wearing.
You can argue of course that when everything goes royally to sh*t, as it most certainly has for Isabell, and Anja, who is grappling with some massive issues of her own, that moments of fleeting joy get comprehensively crushed underfoot by the unrelenting nastiness of life and that’s just how things are.
But where Cicadas (Zikaden) misses the mark is that it mistakes somewhat pointless narrative meandering for ruminative thoughtfulness, something the film, despite clear aims to be that kind of story, does not possess.
It clearly wants to be a film that reflects on how randomly interesting things such as unlikely friendships can develop when all the usual rules and settings of life to that point are thrown out the window, and while it somewhat succeeds in that task, it never really sticks the landing.
What you end up is a film that puts lots of pieces in place, assembling life truths and harried realities in one unremitting exhausting line, but which then just largely lets them sit there with not much in the way of resolution.
Again, you can argue that that is what life is often like and that while we all crave closure and nice, neat endings, that what we often end up with are the broken pieces but not much in the way of meaningful or lasting repair.
But what we see in Cicadas (Zikaden) is precious little healing or forward direction of any kind, with any resultant changes that occur as part of the two women’s disrupted life journeys feeling like half-done or halfhearted moments that never really amount to much.
Even the ending, which offers some sort of step forward, feels a little contrived and oddly discordant, especially one particularly shocking scene in the final act where Anja stands by, perhaps out of empathetic understanding, though that’s never made clear, and does nothing while Isabell watches on.
It’s an example of the way the film throws in some fairly emotional intense developments and then ignores their impact on the characters and the narrative which becomes so naturalistic that it manifests a distinct lack of emotional remove from the story.
Things that should elicit some sort of seismic reaction seem to land without any impact, bar agonised facial expressions or awkward discomfort, and while that is no doubt meant to reinforce how overwhelmed these characters are, it simply serves in the end up to widen the chasm that exists between huge life moments and the almost dispassionate way the characters regard them or react to them.
Cicadas (Zikaden) is not a bad movie as such; there’s quite a lot of expressive, vulnerable humanity on display in a story that realistically portrays how badly life can go at times and how little agency there is when it does to amend or fix things.
But while that’s all well and good, and resonates on a fairly deep level, the film itself feels curiously removed from its subject matter as if someone has erected a wall between narrative action and character response, and while yes, that’s likely meant to show how we don’t always respond in the way we’d like to, and that friendships like that is Isabell and Anja can grow in the discordant in-between life moments that result, it feels like someone has muted all the emotions of the film, leaving Cicadas (Zikaden) feeling strangely unaffecting and lacking in any kind of meaningful or lasting impact.