Writer is haunted by a protagonist he created himself. Everything is taken away from him, even his greatest pride, his huge penis. In an exuberant Freudian surrealist style. By the maker of Die Unberührbare – and then different.
In his latest film Oskar Röhler certainly does not built on the success of Die Unberührbare. Mood and style could hardly be more different. This occasionally baroque, surreal drama refers in some ways to the distorted fantasies of German Expressionism in the silent cinema.The successful novel writer Dr. Jekyll is in a crisis. He thinks that the protagonists of his novel, his alter ego Mr. Hyde, wants to take off with his personality. His psychiatrist tries to calm him by persuading him he is suffering from a midlife crisis with a trace of schizophrenia, but for Jekyll, the threats take very concrete forms. Hyde escapes from his imagination into reality and robs Jekyll of everything of value. In this way, Jekyll first loses his impressively large penis, his hair and teeth will follow. His young girlfriend leaves him and his ex-wife says he is crazy. Only his coke-sniffing daughter continues to listen to him. His personality as writer is then also taken from him, when he is accused of stealing the manuscripts of his great novel from Hyde. Röhler does not limit himself to portraying a kind of literal Freudian fear of castration. Contemporary cultural and media circles are the main butt of this often biting satire. For instance, Wolfgang Joop acts but also parodies himself. –IFFR
Oskar Roehler, born January 21, 1959, in Starnberg, as the son of writer Gisela Elsner (who later emigrated to the GDR) and Luchterhand editor Klaus Roehler. Oskar Roehler grew up with his father in Berlin. From the beginning of the 1980s on, Roehler worked as a writer und published “Abschnappuniversum”, a collection of stories, in 1984. He wrote screenplays for Christoph Schlingensief (“Terror 2000”, 1992) and for Niklaus Schilling ("Deutschfieber, 1992), among others. In 1995, Roehler made his debut as a director with the one-hour long low budget production “Gentleman”. In 1997, Roehler won the award as “Best new director” at the Munich film festival for his second film “Silvester Countdown” (“In With The New”, 1996). Three years later, he made his final breakthrough with “Die Unberührbare” (“No Place To Go”, 2000), a film about the life of his mother. Roehler won the German film award for “Best picture” as well as several awards from international festivals (including Miami, Karlovy… read more