Photo: ZDF. All rights reserved.
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Imagine: a film about five girlfriends, all in their late twenties, who have been going on vacation to Lake Garda for thirteen years. The sixth friend cancels the first evening by voice message. The apartment on Lake Garda, like the motorboat, belongs to Francesca’s (Natalia Rudziewicz) parents. Franci wants to get married soon. Now they could dig up the letters and photos once deposited on the mountain, as they had sworn they would, in case a friend got married. Although Franci methodically deals with the preparations for the wedding, one suspects that she does not want to marry Konstantin at all. Luz (Janet Rothe) is studying photography, but the lecturers didn’t like the series of dead birds (“Patriarchy”) and she’s always been secretly in love with Franci.
Amalie (Homa Faghiri) lives in her parents’ basement and has just been exmatriculated, which she doesn’t tell anyone. Sophie (Ina Maria Jaich) has broken up with her boyfriend for the second time, and he is now following her meekly. Fana (Thandi Sebe) noticed on a Tinder date that she already knew the man – she noticed it from his smell. They go boating, they argue, they drink alcohol, meet two little Italians, steal a bull sculpture, swim and laugh and dance and cook and lie around and go to Venice and meet Jasmine “Blümchen” Wagner and every secret comes out.
Sinje Köhler wrote and directed “Viva Forever”, but nothing about this captivatingly believable film seems written and directed. Köhler himself has often been to Lake Garda – she shows the country and people like Rossellini in “Viaggio In Italia”. Your film was shown at the Munich Film Festival in 2021 and is now in the ZDF media library as “Das kleine Fernsehspiel”. It is a generation film and a sensual masterpiece in which there is no wrong gesture, no wrong dialogue, no wrong theatricality. Even the fish in the bathtub, the stolen bull and the missing girlfriend are not dramaturgical clichés – they only set in motion the truth game, the disillusionment and self-deception.
“Viva Forever” is a song by the Spice Girls. But you don’t hear the song, you hear “1001 Nights” in Italian and a sleazy disco version of “Sloop John B.”. The most beautiful songs in the world.
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