Rompecabezas

The novel by Henrich, "Die Schachspielerin", on which the Kevin Kline movie was based was published in German in 2007, I think, and is available on Amazon.

She has her 50th anniversary and does all the work, including serving her guests, which are ignoring her. But she gets one useful present. This puzzle.

An this Argentinian housewife suddenly is blessed with talent, something nobody including her family family had ever thought of. This is about her slowly breaking out, meeting a puzzle partner who trains her until they can enter a competition together. There was a way out.

A fine little movie with low voice, never arguing. Heroism can also be about sitting at a table. It mostly is, in this thing we call life. The heroism which really changes it.

It might be a movie about passion (of puzzle), but of course it is much more, though not a riddle to see through the hints the director is giving us. The puzzle stands for so much more and while it is difficult to think of how a movie would work with a theme about this, it indeed works quite well as I had the chance to witness at the Internation Festival in Berlin this February.

As you can see this is a non-English movie and lately I saw a trailer for a movie with Kevin Kline, if I'm not mistaken, where the movie itself seemed to be a remake of this one. They just changed the "game" (no pun intended) and chess out of it. Couldn't find it under the movie connection on IMDb ... though I guess it can't be too long before someone notices. It just seems to similar. But however good that movie is, it took the easy way, with chess. A game that is so much more popular and so much more interesting to watch others do. With puzzle(s) you have the risk to annoy and bore people. Which might easily have happened to some here too. But it's not about the game ... it's about the players (or characters if you will).

Maybe a remake of "Queen to Play" with Kevin Kline? That movie, released in 2009, credits a novel by Caroline Buttaro and Bertina Henrichs. There is a German novel by Henrichs, "Die Schachspielerin", but that was published in 2016.