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eduard’s promise / kino, 91min, 35mm farbe
excerpts of an interview with the director Andreas Wunderlich: ‘Eduard’s Promise’ is an exception in today’s German film scene. This film has a face that you don’t forget; unwielding, full of edges, very visual - with its own rhythm which is irritating
in the way it goes back and forth between action and stasis.
Eduard’s Promise is like a snapshot of the story of an odd couple. I was not interested in
using film to speed up the action, but rather slowing things down to the absolute minimum, almost letting them come to a standstill. Once a person is alone like that you get to see layers which are otherwise covered by the action. That
makes it both calming and irritating, just like in real life, and at the same time it is concentrated film. (...) The whole time Julia is fighting for Eduard in a race against a time scheme she has set herself. It’s only when there are
gaps in the plot that you can feel the fear that eggs her on. The fear that nothing she has in life has been a present, including this man’s love. So she has to take everything she wants.
The outline of the film is a 24-hour day. Within these 24 hours there are loose, almost
isolated episodes of encounters and incidents. In the end the protagonists don’t seem to have gotten much of anywhere, compared with other film stories. Does „Eduard’s Promise“ describe a circle rather than the classical development?
Both.The minor deviations from the circles lead to important developments.(...) In film
there is always this wish that they should be united forever, even if, for goodness sake, they have to die. Eduard’s Promise describes what it means to build up trust. This process is far from being finished at the end of the day. I leave
no doubts that it will take a long time for them to find a kind of peace with each other and that they have got a tough road ahead of them. Rather than letting them die in the end in order to do the audience a favor, I give them a future
with that last big scene after all those borders they have crossed, the misunderstandings and the catastrophes. With Eduard’s Promise I pay tribute to all true optimists, simply because I don’t let love disappear in some unreachable film
pattern. I show two human beings who are in the end prepared to make a concession and trust one another even when they are in greatest doubt. That is the most precious thing you can do. There’s no incredible development and the world has
not turned topsy-turvy. It’s just a small slice of life and one moment in a long process - threatened by the environment, patterns of expectation, the insatiable and the fear of being alone.(...) The two of them are as slow as I am. In
order to become a couple they need years if not the rest of their lives. They are incabable, unlike others, to nail down their love and move on into a static state. How to do that is the content of a different kind of cinema but not mine.
I wouldn’t even know how to do it.
You mention Michelangelo Antonioni in the credits. Why „thinking of Michelangelo
Antonioni“?
Around 1960 Antonioni developed a certain mastery in recounting things and
almost letting them come to a complete standstill, as in his films L’eclisse, L’avventura and La notte. He tells about the time other films leave out. Moving in these inbetween spaces is the most difficult and yet exciting challenge a
film can be faced with. Exciting because nowhere do you encounter the hectic stories of our existence more clearly and without disturbance. Difficult, because you are faced with somehow bringing an internal, in the beginning at least,
invisible movement to the screen. These words in the credits were to remind us of a highly developed film culture, which seems lost here and which I truly miss.
„Eduard’s Promise“ takes a real risk with its casting of the lead roles, which are pretty
contrary to the classical lovers you generally find in film. The part of the lover is taken by Thierry van Werveke, who usually, as in „Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door“, plays the ‘bad guy’. In this case he has been cast in a clearly positive
part, even in a love story, something most others would probably not have thought him capable of.
I think my actors are classical lovers for a modern screen. It goes without saying, they
aren’t 25 any more. They both are beautiful because of the way life has left its mark on them, and they both have a depth you don’t forget. That is the best prerequisite for my story. I wasn’t able to take commercial aspects into
account for the casting. Then I would have had to have told a different story.
With its almost 550,000 Mark production costs instead of an originally
planned 2.4 million DM, „Eduard’s Promise“ is a low-budget film on the border of being a no-budget film. It recounts a story full of nuances, with lots of changes of motive, a constant dependency on weather in the course of a six week
filming period, produced with a very young team. How do you stop these factors from turning against the project?
Easy: by working with the right team. Under production circumstances such as ours you can’t
solve problems with money. Everything is ...
more / part two...
