Elementarteilchen

Other reviews suggested this film was based on a French novel. If so, I have not read it and have no intention to. I watched this film strictly as a stand-alone entity, not knowing much about its background and its director, Oskar Roehler. I watched it out of a liking for international cinema, hoping I would land a good one. And I did.

One can argue this is a serious film, on a popular subject: love and its impact on life. Apart from some minor 'imperfections', e.g. the physical resemblance of the brothers played by different actors portraying them in youth and adulthood, with one done right and the other out of whack, I find the film was very well done and it commanded my attention throughout all its 112 minutes.

Perhaps it strikes a chord with intellectuals - one brother is a renowned physicist and the other an academic. It is a film that engages you and makes you think and try to get inside the minds of the protagonists, played as two half-brothers with entirely opposite life styles. One more likable than the other.

I enjoyed this film greatly, and regarded it one of the few, memorable German films I have seen in recent years.

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.

I wasn't expecting much of this film, even knowing what's it about. I was surprised how cleverly it was made. The main themes of this film are sex and love. Though there was a lot of profanity, everything fit perfectly. It's not one of those films where is a lot of unnecessary profanity just to shock audience. Another good thing about this film is, that it's characters always talk openly with each other, so you get to know them in a very short time and even start to like them. Actually this is a sad story, but I found this movie being optimistic sometimes. It's well filmed and there are many good German actors in this film. There were many unexpected twist, even the ending was not like I expected. It's interesting, funny, shocking and really worth your time.

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.