19/05/2006

A film with an insidiously corrosive atmosphere under a summer sun was the highlight of today’s Critics‘ Week programme, with the screening of Pingpong [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Matthias Luthardt
interview: Sebastian Urzendowsky
film profile], a promising debut feature by German director Matthias Luthardt.

Set in an isolated villa in the middle of a forest, the film brings together five characters during a seemingly mundane week: a father, a spineless executive; an authoritarian housewife in her bourgeois splendour; their teenage son, who is preparing a piano audition; their nephew, who turns up unexpectedly for some holidays; and Schumann the dog, in a role of his own.

In the garden, a ping-pong table and a swimming pool the nephew is renovating provide the set, which the director skilfully uses to inject little variations in the story of a family poisoned behind the mask it presents to society.

The character who provokes and triggers change is the nephew Paul (Sebastian Urzendowky), who is weighed down with the burden of his father’s recent suicide and escapes to his video console and instinctive behaviour. After his uncle leaves on a business trip, Paul seduces his aunt and plays a part in the explosive frustrations of his cousin, who is slipping towards alcoholism in order to cope with the pressures of his piano studies with his omnipresent tutor, his mother.

Once the swimming pool is finished, the father is back from his business trip and the piano is out of the scene, the young man will get revenge on his lover, whom he ignores by sacrificing his favourite character in the house, Schumann.

The story is based on simple narrative lines that Luthardt unwinds subtly, to gradually create a latent atmosphere of aggression where each character’s wounds emerge one after another, revealed through sober camerawork that follows the actors tightly. The final result is a film by a director who knows how to make intelligent use of simple elements and rarefied events.

Produced by Berlin-based outfit Junifilm with co-production funding from the Hochschule fuer Film & Fernsehen "Konrad Wolf", MDR and Koppmedia, Pingpong is being sold internationally by Media Luna Entertainment.

(Translated from French)