Les Particules élémentaires

In Berlin, the scientist Michael Djerzinski (Christian Ulmen) decides to return to Ireland to proceed his research about genetics that he left behind three years ago. Meanwhile, his racist, bigoted, sexually disturbed and addicted in masturbation half-brother Bruno Klement (Moritz Bleibtreu) has just divorced from his wife and is interned in a psychiatric clinic for therapy. Michael and Bruno were left by their hippie mother that moved to Poona when they were child and their dysfunctional childhood reflects in their personality and sexual behavior. When Michael is informed that the remains of his grandmother should be replaced since a new road will pass by the cemetery, he visits his childhood sweetheart Annabelle (Franka Potente) and finds that she is an experienced woman that has had a crush on him since she was five years old. Further, she had had many deceptions in her love affairs, while Michael is still virgin. Meanwhile Bruno meets the liberal Christiane (Martina Gedeck) in a nudist camp and he believes she is the woman of his life, until a tragedy happens.

"Elementarteilchen" is a tragically weird, sometimes very unpleasant, low budget movie. Bruno is hateful character, with his sick and selfish behavior and prejudice. His essay about black people and his comments about Brazil are despicable. However, the performance of Moritz Bleibtreu is top-notch. I also liked very much the performance of Martina Gedeck. Christian Ulmen and Franka Potente complete the good cast of this strange and dramatic romance. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "Partículas Elementares" ("Elementary Particles")

I really looked forward to this film because I've read the book of Michel Houllebecq and this book was quite an interesting piece of literature...written in a very direct and unusual way, compelling, intellectually challenging. But still...this comment is not about the book so a few words about the film: My impression was that they failed to create the typical kind of atmosphere that you experience reading one of Houllebecqs novels. the story often seemed to be an arbitrary mix of some scenes of the book...needless to say - having read the book I knew the deeper sense behind many scenes but I guess without that I would have asked myself quite often...'what has this to do with the rest of the film and why should this be of any interest??' This film never really convinced me nor caught my interest and I think the only remarkable thing about this movie was the solid acting performance of Moritz Bleibtreu in the role as "Bruno". So, all in all it is maybe a better choice for you to grab the book out of the shelf instead of wasting your time with this second-class interpretation.

This is a plodding, clueless adaptation of Michel Houellebecq's novel of the same name. It manages to include many of the book's dialogs verbatim, while completely missing its point. The main evidence is the outrageous change of the conclusion - the director just mined the novel for catchy phrases and totally refused to tackle its challenging ideas. Or rather he was not able to notice them. Even apart from that, the adaptation is dumb. One example: when Bruno describes to the psychiatrist the biological details of the decomposition of a human corpse, he uses lines that are there in the book, down to the moths with "the names of Italian starlets" - but they belong to the narrator, not to Bruno! Such knowledge is completely inappropriate for his character.

I don't mind the downplaying of the sex scenes - watch some porn if you have never seen it. The causality of the philosophy and culture of the times and the parents' lives on the lives of the main protagonists, the whole point of Michael's enigmatic life, the desperation of the obsession with sex and narcissism of the body, the sheer horror and cruelty of Bruno's existence, all this is downplayed to the point of absence. Houellebecq created a gripping world in his novel that you cannot shake off even if you think you know that he isn't right. The director produced a made-for-TV movie.

The Elementary Particles is a genuinely beautiful movie, well-shot and with several very powerful scenes; it also has two very strong lead performances. The first half is captivating and intriguing; unfortunately, that's where everything that's good about the film is. By the time the film was half-finished I was exhausted and felt like it was trying very hard to shock me. The real shame is that while the film feels like shock cinema, it actually deals with some very important and delicate issues - but it relies far too heavily on clichés and melodrama to allow for those to be taken seriously or create any real thought or debate. It's a self indulgent art piece that tries so hard to be artistic and tragic that it loses sight of what it actually wanted to say.

Elementary particles starts out as a quest for existence and what this word really means. Two brothers (half-brothers to be precise) realize their lives are not what kids dream about however much they seem to fit in the „mechanism". One is having doubts about his devotion to chase his scientific pioneering while the other does not seem to find comfort in teaching literature any more while being constantly turned down by publishers and neglected by his wife. They both have to reach back to their roots to be able to find out where to go from here, though Bruno (Moritz Bleibtrau) does so amidst rather compulsive circumstances, in a clinic he ends up in. They have not been given much of a head-start in life with their capricious, self-indulgent, impulsive and utterly careless hippie mother who left them both with their troubled and lonesome adolescence. Life has taken no mercy either – that is not the nature of things. Michael (Christian Ulmen) however, finds some inspiration to carry on in the shape of an old, more-than-friend girl pal, while Bruno has to rethink and reestablish his everyday needs and desires. He is living his second childhood – a time without constraints but full of uncertainty and odd, unbalanced characters – trying to escape his feeling of being redundant. Oscar Roehler's stark and thick drama seems a little exaggerating, a bit too much, nevertheless depicts life as it is: after stripped from all the fake Christmas wrappers, often desperate, pitiful at most times and forgiving only every once in a while.