Lightmaker

I've seen this movie at the Zurich Film Festival in 2009 where they premiered the Director's Cut, an almost completely re-cut, rewritten version with new dialogs and a (probably) new soundtrack. I went to see it as a fan of Yello, the band where Meier sings. This film might be his longest project, as it started in 1988. He is the director, producer, writer, actor, and Yello made the music, too. Most of the cast are from Poland and the movie was shot in the early 90's. You can see parts of the film in Yello's music video "Tremendous Pain" (from the 1994 album Zebra).

It is a fantasy tale about a magical violin and a talented violinist who is lured into an underground world following a beautiful woman. Then he has to play the violin to light a big crystal ball that gives energy to that world, a world full of strange people in strange costumes. At first the movie made sense but after an hour most of its artistic merits turned into boredom. The constant changing of the film through the years, the fact they recorded many dialogs again - the lip sync was visible many times - didn't help enough. I think it became easier to understand the story than in 2001, when it was shown in Berlin, but it's still difficult to follow (partly because the sound of the dialogs were bad and they whispered a lot).

The new music was nice, but little. It had some recent Yello tunes, even a completely new song in the end, but I found it strange they didn't make the music more articular while it's a central part of the story. The violin solos were great though. There was much effort put in this film, that's for sure, and the persistence in making it is respectable. I personally think it would have been better to start over the project than dragging it for so long. I could imagine this story as a visually stunning anime with lots of music instead of the old costumes and 80's-style special effects. It was very interesting and original but failed to entertain.

I was going to give only 5 but in retrospect, it's worth a 6. Went to see the re-edited version of the film at the Zurich Film Festival. Dieter was kind enough to put me on his guest list ;-)

This version is NOT the one most people saw at the Berlinale in 2002. They took the original material, added a few extra scenes, a whole new soundtrack and new cut. It helps, and made the movie a bit more easy to understand but still not good enough. The movie's biggest weakness is the poor sound quality of dialogs. 1. it's dubbed, since most of the actors are polish and spoke polish. The English voice-over is poor, because it's spoken by polish actors who speak English. Come on... if you lip-sync a movie ANYWAY, why don't you just use real English speakers? It sounded like C-series Chinese kung-fu movie, dubbed English. 2. On top of that, the quality of audio was very very bad and I couldn't make out most of what they said. No subtitles either..

Another problem, I don't think the actors were good. There was no arc to any character. It was all very chaotic.

On the flipside... music sound quality was excellent and filled with Yello's latest tracks. (Actually, I would have liked more of that!)

Dieter is a great visionary, and I can see what he was TRYING to show here. How music can fill even the darkest places with light. It's a nice story with HUGE potential.

Dieter, if you're reading this: my advice: re-shoot it. Keep it a small, low budget indie project.... There are so many talented young movie people out there. Throw away the old material, and start over. It's worth it!

I have seen this film last year on the BERLINALE and I was shocked, that somebody spend money on such things. The biggest rubbish I have ever seen on cinema.