Finsterworld

Emerging from a state of nature to historically contextualize the present, eccentricity multifariously contesting its conditions, authenticity, percolating its plight, poetic instances of curious introspective creativity contentiously enraging the callous, cruelty and innocence sociopathically and lovingly coexisting, tricks, cancellations, balanced asymmetrical genders, beetles and dress-ups and birds, the conformist's intention to ignore, in Frauke Finsterwalder's Finsterworld, a dynamic open-ended multigenerational cross-section, microscopically invested, with macroscopic instigations.

Interpretively dependent.

Spoiler alert.

World War II's legacy haunts the film and difference, while uplifting it to an aesthetic celestial syntax, in various ways, is often contemptuously reprimanded.

The ethnic school teacher who takes his students on a trip to a concentration camp, focussing on its abhorrence, ends up in jail after rescuing a student who's been brutally pranked, giving in to his perverted instincts in the process.

The African character found in the film's final moments is listless and primitive, as seen when a documentary filmmaker ironically visits Africa in search of the authentic, ironic because her visit's based on the recommendation of her policeperson partner, whom she rejects after he reveals he's a genuine furry.

The other german men who salute difference include a pedicurist who takes the dead skin from his clients and then bakes it into cookies which he eventually serves to them as a treat. When one client admits her love for him, he reveals his secret, which is naturally met with ghastliness, although they do end up together.

A school boy who poetically and comically talks to beetles and puppets made out of his hand, reminiscent of Thomas Törless, is assaulted by a wealthy SUV renting tough guy, after possibly viewing his wife relieving herself at the side of the road. The three become quite friendly, when the man who lives in the woods and has just had his dwelling vandalized and bird friend killed starts firing shots from a bridge at the passing traffic, one of them fatally wounding the boy; as if to say that this young Törless's future would unfortunately resemble that of the humble forest dweller, who has therefore spared him a life of loneliness.

The death and incarceration of these two characters (the forest dweller ends up in jail), as well as the rejection of the furry, are perhaps vindicated by the pedicurist's romance, as an elderly german matron embraces difference, perhaps paving the way for a more inclusive cultural frame.

Perhaps Germany is quite inclusive at the moment, I'm just interpreting the evidence provided by this film.

The younger generation's sociopathic rep who doesn't want to accept World War II's legacy and doesn't speak up to save the ethnic school teacher, even though he was the prankster in question, while torturing his helpless victim further in the aftermath by insulting her intelligence, casts doubt on this possibility.

Which makes for a well-rounded albeit bleak conclusion.

To a depressingly thoughtful and brilliant reflexivity.

Outstandingly controversial film.