A sober look at the working class, a detached look at love: the film “All You Are” by Michael Fetter Nathansky is exceptionally good.
Work, love, resilience: Nadine (Aenne Schwarz) and Paul in “All You Are” Photo: Port aux Prince Images
Everyone is in an uproar except her. Nadine (Aenne Schwarz) pushes her way through a crowd of stressed workers and bureaucrats whose flood of conversation rains down on her. Paul, her husband (Carlo Ljubek), has barricaded himself in the basement of the company where he was trying to get a job. But just minutes after the interview began, he stormed out of the office.
Nadine knows the reason for Paul’s behavior, which only causes misunderstanding among the people around him. With practiced determination, she climbs over the barrier and approaches her husband, who suffers from anxiety, with soothing words. When she, and the camera, see him for the first time, he stands before her like a sturdy ox. She gently strokes his fur and snuggles against him, the animal’s gaze wandering stoically.
Paul will continue to change shape throughout the action. As a small child (Sammy Schrein), he will sometimes cower from his wife and anxiously ask her forgiveness for the trouble he causes her with his face hidden in his hands. When his courage returns and he even dares a little, he meets her as a young adult (Youness Aabbaz). When he manages to get her to safety and care for her, he is suddenly confronted by Nadine as a motherly old lady (Jule Nebel-Linnenbaum).
The pleasant and unpleasant parts
In “All You Are,” director and screenwriter Michael Fetter Nathansky uses a methodology similar to that recently used in the film Tragicomedy ‘The Ordinary People’, which he wrote together with Sophie Linnenbaum. While a strictly hierarchical (cinema) world in which main and secondary characters compete for as much screen time as possible served as a metaphor for social inequality, the symbolism in this new film is not a complacent stylistic gimmick.
Paul’s constantly changing appearance is the only surreal element that the otherwise extremely realistic drama allows. And this also has the sole purpose of making reality, as Nadine perceives it, more visible. In it, Paul breaks down his components, the pleasant and the unpleasant, which his wife carefully examines and studies so that she can make sense of them. However, she cannot really devote herself to these considerations.
Because ‘All You Are’ is at least as much a sober social drama as it is a minimally magical love drama. In addition to her work as a mechatronics engineer, Nadine takes care of her husband and two small daughters in a company that maintains the fleet of a Rhenish mining company and is threatened with extinction by the impending phase-out of coal.
In the workshop, a similar picture emerges as in their relationship: while her colleagues panic, she acts with decisive tactics and tries to unite and calm the workforce. The atmosphere of the film swings masterfully between the heavy gravity and the gallows humor of those who are used to nothing but precarious circumstances; Those who have no choice but to take this seriousness lightly do not want to despair of it. In particular Sara Fazilat (“Holy Spider”) stars as a shirt-sleeved colleague who covers up the frustration about her own powerlessness with cheeky humor.
The resilience of the working class
It has been a long time since there has been a film in German cinema that so precisely captures the special resilience of the working class, without idealizing it, and depicts their daily hardships without veering into bitterness.
This need to constantly fight is probably what threatens to destroy Nadine and Paul’s marriage; why Nadine becomes estranged from her husband. But as “All That You Are” suggests on a second narrative level in dreamlike flashbacks, it is also this shared experience of constantly having to fight, of supporting each other, that brought them together in the first place.
At the end there will be a sentence that is again more symbolic than anything else. One that is full of possibilities without romanticizing reality. ‘All Who You Are’ emerges as an extraordinary relationship drama that seems pleasantly ethereal and otherworldly, yet draws on the fullness of life.