chinesischesroulette

This feels like a feature-lenght treatment of a comedy-routine that could have also been told in a ten-minute short. Also, technical credits are sup-par. The film really feels like a film school diploma project.

The cast is a mix of seasoned stage pros and talented newcomers but the problems is the superficial scrip. Their lines feel constructed, exactly like cued TV show material.

The director fails to take his protagonists seriously, therefore we are not touched by their problems and conflicts.

The film has been cleverly marketed and offers a unique selling point, but in the end the film disappoints on all levels.

This is a TV movie at its very mediocre. By staying close to the text of the novel by Martin Walser, the director fails to find a visual language of its own. While the actors are good (especially Rosel Zech, the film never develops any kind of tension between the characters. You watch them, but audiences cannot get involved with them. Also, the budget restraints and the limited imagination of the director make two key scenes (the horse incident and the storm on Lake Constance) look rather amateurish. One cannot help but feel bored by it after some time.

This is a typical example of an old-fashioned literary TV adaptation that was probably good for its time and was shown to a whole generation of high school students in lieu of text readings but fails to connect with audiences today.

The new 2007 version from the same source novella, on the other hand, offers both perfect entertainment and an intelligent, contemporary interpretation of the text. But, who knows, in twenty years someone else will make yet another film based on it....