This is some farmhouse! It seems to go on forever and it provides quite an effective location for this tale of four generations of the same family as they deal with life, love and tragedy across the best part of a century. Tempered with some mischief from time to time, this is not a cheery film to watch, indeed the escapades of turn of the (20th) century "Alma"; "Erika" whose story is set against the background of the Second World War; "Angelika" as the nineteen-eighties get up and running before finally "Lenka" in 2025 - at various stages of their lives, rarely delivers us anything to put a smile on their or our faces. What it does do, though, is allow us to take a grandstand seat and observe just how society, attitudes and even technology evolved as the candle gave way to electricity; the horse to the car and the women begin to take a great deal more control over their futures and their choices by the fourth iteration than they did at the first. Their stories are interwoven so it's not just a straightforward chronology of who did what to whom, when and where - and that's where I felt a little of the intrigue lay. The performances from the younger children especially Hannah Heckt's "Alma" and Filip Schnack's "Fritz" are really quite engaging as is the characterful one of Laeni Geiseler's "Lenka" and by simply sitting and watching the intimate photography intrude - but rarely pruriently - into their daily grinds, struggles and occasionally joy too this proves to be a remarkably easy thing to appreciate. Some of the arcs are complete, some are not and I think that quite clevery suggests an element of continuity to the processes of living and by the end I couldn't help but wonder if we were to make another version featuring the next four generations, what that might look like in 2125? It can be a little sluggish at times, but if you can watch it in the cinema then it sort of washes over you in quite a compelling fashion; it looks stylish and there is certainly some comment contained within it's frames that provokes some thinking.
