"Always this disgusting sex". To read the reviews of Jan Bonny's 'Wintermärchen'
After a visit to the cinema yesterday and the subsequent reading of the feature reviews, I started to ponder - or rather, by pondering and discussing together after the film with my cinema companions Silvia Bahl and Sebastian Köthe, without whom this text would not have been written.
We saw 'Wintermärchen ' by Jan Bonny. The film, highly relevant and difficult to endure in the best sense of the word, tells the story of a racially motivated terrorist triangle - one is immediately reminded of the NSU. What is special and controversial about the film is that it focuses primarily on two forces: hate/violence/murder and sex. I don't want to write any more about the movie, but about how the movie and this apparently difficult to bear connection was written about.
[spoiler alert]
The feature reviews give the impression that emphasizing one's own indignation and disgust is a necessary consequence that viewers must draw when sex and terrorist violence are presented together. And this is despite the fact that, if you look closely, the staging of sex in 'Winter's Tale' works differently from the callous hardcore rampaging in other neo-Nazi films. In contrast, the explicit scenes in Jan Bonny look surprisingly 'normal'. Normal = no steely bodies, the groping seems clumsy ("ouch!"), there's insecurity, jealousy, envy, it seems bored, then, to spice it up, erotic fantasies are shared with the partner as if you got the tip from Glamour.
During one of these desire sessions, he tells his partner that he would love to see her having sex with another man. Tada! - Like a genie in a bottle, the third man suddenly appears to steal his girlfriend from under his nose. So it goes back and forth, she with him, she with the other, he with him, in the end all three together - and it's this last 'unifying' scene à la Tom Tykwer that needs to be discussed in more detail, because apparently no reviewer has watched it properly.
What we see in the explicit scenes: Cunnilingus, riding position, missionary position and male anal penetration. What we don't see, but might expect after reading some reviews: BDSM aesthetics and practices or classic enactments of power imbalances (for example, the woman does not perform deepthroat, there are no cumshots to the face and no Nazi slogans are shouted during the act). If the reviews describe the sex scenes as being too violent, then the worst thing is actually when the men want to get at the woman when she's not in the mood and she has to shout "no, let me!" several times - but then the line is not crossed, even if the repetition is often enough. And that during the sex fantasy sharing the woman uses the N-word when she says who she would like to sleep with - but you wouldn't expect her to use any other language!
In any case, they mainly go out to kill senselessly and spread their ugly slogans in pubs.
The final threesome is surprising, despite everything, because of how tenderly and relaxed everyone treats each other. Something completely different unfolds here than in the brutal scenes of violence. After the woman has fled from the men's same-sex sex, which she had previously solicited from them, this is no longer a problem at the end. On the contrary, she watches curiously as he gives him a blow job, then she is invited to climb onto the mattress with him and carefully inserts herself. One of them fucks her and is suddenly amazed. She laughs heartily and asks if he has come, he is embarrassed to admit that he was taken by surprise, they laugh, it's no problem, hey, then the other one will just carry on shagging and the premature ejaculator leans back and looks lovingly at the couple. In the end, they all cuddle up together and take turns deciding who gets to lie in the middle.
In all other scenes they are, not to mention, obnoxious.
And this is what the feature pages write:
From "unmotivated long and constantly recurring disgusting sex scenes" (NZZ). "Absolutely ugly", "boundlessly ugly", "fucking and executing migrants merge here into a disgusting drive." (Spiegel Online)
"But he [Bonny] shows the endless sex scenes so persistently that they freeze into a mere pose, at some point they just get tiring. By the time the three of them are permanently rolling around in the sheets at the end, the supposed shock effect has long since worn off. Sex and violence, yes, we get it." (Zeit Online) Why are the scenes reduced to a mere shock effect? Has the author "understood" something here? Then he continues: "Above all, the numerous scenes with copulating bodies in alternating pairings - Becky with Tommi, Becky with Maik, Tommi with Maik and finally all together - are something we would like to be spared." Honestly, and not with the ironic tone of a rhetorical question, I really want to know: Why would you like to spare them? Why is this sex something that cannot be endured? Because Nazis are not allowed to have sex? Because the connection between sex and violence is unbearable (why?)? Because violent Nazis can't have tender sex per se? Because sex goes beyond narrative cinema - both as a spectacle and in its redundancy? Answers to these questions could provide exciting insights into the film's aesthetic strategies and decisions; the prerequisite for this, however, is to first remain descriptive of what the film actually shows and not immediately believe its own initial automatisms when interpreting and evaluating without question.
"The explanation of NSU right-wing extremism based on hate, sex and sadomasochism corresponds to certain quite convincing theories of fascism. But the movie is not even close to being a German 'Salo'." (SWR2) As I said, there was no sadomasochism. And why can sex and fascism only be accepted in Sade's exuberant torture aesthetics?
The repeatedly asserted triad "have sex, drink, murder" (SZ) or "Fucking, killing, drinking - one leads to the other" (tagesspiegel) - Zeit online adds "Fucking, killing, drinking, arguing" to the title - claims that everything takes place on the same level, with similar qualities, when the sex depicted here stands out so much, especially in the last scene. This is a flattening that refuses to look closely.
You don't have to like the sex scenes or the whole film, the combination of delicacy and triviality on the one hand and right-wing extremism on the other is irritating and you ask yourself what this production wants and is supposed to do, but you can only think about that if you don't fantasize about combat boots (swr.de) that none of the protagonists are wearing. While mocking tastelessness, exciting possibilities for interpretation are overlooked. Doesn't sexuality per se enter into an exciting relationship with violence? Isn't there a latent violence in sexuality and doesn't sex also serve as a rejection mechanism?
"Love & violence: processes that reveal what one had been doing all along: sexuality [...], used to deal with the unresolved violence that was in one's own bodies; this was also part of the attempt at liberation; and where "liberation" increasingly failed to materialize, violence increasingly emerged again..." (Klaus Theweleit: Salzen & Entsalzen. Wechsel in den sexuellen Phantasien einer Generation) Do the protagonists save themselves in their - always comical - sexual acts in order to transform the killing? It would be worth thinking about.
Ultimately, what you read from the reviews is above all overstrain, the desire not to have to look. But why do the stagings of racist violence seem more acceptable than hardly any specifically Nazi sexuality?
Ultimately, I still don't understand myself what it means that neo-Nazis in this movie have sex the way they have sex and murder the way they murder. But the significant forces that unfold here can only be discovered if you look and confront the ambiguities.
