It’s not uncommon for a film to have a moving love story at its core. Yet this particular set-up is unusual. The lovers here are Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, both important representatives of post-war German-language poetry. The story of the relationship between the Austrian and the Jew from Czernowitz is told through their nearly 20-year correspondence (1948–1967). Or, more precisely, by a young woman and a young man reading from their letters in a studio in Vienna’s venerable Funkhaus.
A complex and enigmatic plot that evokes the life of Bachmann. The story develops around an unusual triangular relationship, a threesome between a woman of unknown name, a man named Malina and a Hungarian, Ivan, with whom she falls in love. Ivan will be his last great love, but their need for exclusivity in love is so strong that it can not be understood or matched. Malina is a struggle, a confrontation between two worlds strange and hostile.
Elisabeth, a forty year old woman, visits her old father in the outskirts of Klagenfurt. There, she reflects about her childhood and her romantic life.
A 1968 production of Hans-Werner Henze's comic opera filmed at Berlin's Deutsche Oper. With the plot centering around how a whole town is deceived into taking a dressed monkey as a young lord, the work features performances from, among others, Edith Mathis, Donald Grobe and Barry McDaniel. Christoph von Dohnányi conducts.
