Muttertag

The dramatic last act of this film is - by actors, camera und script - even better than the breakdown of Michael Douglas in Falling Down. The concept of using each actor for a couple of characters makes this film even a hide-and-seek-game for the audience. Visiting the original places in vienna (or similar elsewhere) makes you sure, that most of the story ist real, though its satyrical.

Most Austrian contemporary movies are bad. Austria is famous for classical music and gave the world important modern painters, even Actionism artists, but most of its movies made after the Second World War are forgettable, especially comedies. (The serious movies are all depressing.)

Muttertag is an extremely low-level type of "humor", similar to cheap Italian comedies, only much worse. Every single character and situation is the cheapest possible overdrawn caricature. If your taste is intelligent, witty comedy, you'll hate Muttertag, unless you are 13 years old. It's the type of comedy Austrians are used to, so it's no surprise they adore this movie. Hence, the high ratings.

PS: I live in Austria.

I can think of only one other Austrian movie (or German, for that matter) that dives so deep into social deserts and black parts of the common human, and that is "Hundstage", which could easily be described as "social porn" and is equivalent to Todd Solondz' work, yet darker and more dire. In Muttertag, it's more satire, but with many more levels, and none of them pleasant. You live with a group of people from a lower social level, the Neugebauers in the center of this strange and wicked community, living in a notorious apartment estate in Vienna. Their part of town is satirically portrayed like one of the antechambers of hell - for Austrian standards - a socialistic community of concrete and locked doors, where everybody tries to seclude himself and his dark secrets from everyone else. No Walzer, no Mozart, no Viennese courtesy, no post-monarchistic postcard nostalgia and no hope. Everyday life seems to throw everything at the Neugebauers to bring them down, and everything unfolds right before Mother's Day, which provides a certain forced traditional background for this tour-de-force, like Christmas being a battlefield for family conflicts. And just like at Christmas the private tension induces riot-like scenes in the community, in the supermarket, at church, at the gas station and in school. Satirical portrait with some of the finest Austrian comedians and actors, that will offer a haunting, outlandish and desperate experience for non-Austrians and a mirror of the soul for the locals. Remember, people of Vienna, "another social layer" does not mean that these people aren't living nearby, and their issues apply to you as well, regardless of your social and educational background.

In a housing estate in Vienna everyone prepares for the first Sunday in May. Everybody knows everybody, and everybody knows everybody's dirty little secrets. A boy prepares an electronic knife for his mother to cut herself in the stomach, the grandfather donates all the familiy's money to the WWF and the father's sidestep comes to light.

Beside the film "Indien" "Muttertag" is an Austrian cult-film. Hopefully "Muttertag" will not be synchronized for Germany like they did with "Indien".....(perhaps subtitles would do :))) )

If you don't know the place where this film is set, if you don't know the people you might not understand or like it. Almost every line of this movie is legendary, brilliant performances by Düringer and Dorfer each one playing multiple characters.