The Forest for the Trees

Melanie Pröschle wants to do everything right: The dedicated young teacher from Swabia is starting a new life in Karlsruhe, has broken up with her boyfriend, is looking for connection, is full of drive and optimism. She overexerts herself preparing for unpopular class excursions, tries too hard to build up a friendship with her neighbour, doesn’t really get along with her colleagues, can’t assert herself with the children, doesn’t realize it. At some point, hot chocolate is thrown at her. How the character, played with almost uncanny naivety by Eva Löbau, sees herself diverges so much from how others see her that you constantly want to jump in and give Melanie Pröschle a wake-up call in Maren Ade’s graduation film. Ade’s focus on the art of acting and on a rigorously told story is applied here with the same breathtaking consistency that would later be seen in her films Everyone Else and Toni Erdmann. A drama originally conceived as a comedy, the straightforward and uncompromising way this social and career trainwreck is rendered almost evokes the feeling of a horror film. Everything culminates in one of the most wonderful final sequences of recent German cinema.

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