Very nicely played short film series about a lesbian young woman and her love affair. The six episodes of “Loving Her” can be seen tonight on ZDFneo.
The boss slips his intern in the office an envelope. Inside there are sexy panties and a piece of paper with the blunt request “Put this on”. The young woman does as she is told; shortly thereafter it comes to the “lingerie control” in the copy room.
In almost any other context, this scene would probably have caused a MeToo outcry: sexual harassment at work in its purest form. In this case, however, not, and that is not primarily because the boss is a boss, after all, women can also be sexually harassed. Leonie Krippendorff’s production leaves no doubt that the “harassment” is definitely welcome, because Hanna (Banafshe Hourmazdi), in her mid-twenties, admires the much older Josephine (Karin Hanczewski): as a person, as a woman, as a publisher’s editor. Later it turns out that Josephine also has its downsides, but this experience is nothing new for Hanna; and that’s what the neo series “Loving Her” is about.
“Loving Her” (ZDFNeo): entertaining, because not long
The six episodes are extremely entertaining, which also has to do with their length: They only last ten to twelve minutes each. The concept is similarly clear: each episode revolves around one of the women who left their mark on Hanna’s life. Franzi (Lena Klenke) starts the game. The two meet by chance on the street; the encounter triggers the memory of their relationship in Hanna. Franzi was everything to her: friend, roommate, great love; until the first tensions arose because they were too different. Woman number two is Lara (Emma Drogunova), a party girl who turns Hanna’s life upside down: night becomes day, morning becomes evening; but sex, drugs and alcohol are not enough to meet their needs in the long run.
To the broadcast
“Loving Her”, Saturday, July 3rd, 2021, 9:40 pm on ZDFNeo.
Krippendorff, who wrote the scripts together with Marlene Melchior, does not dwell on profile data. That Hanna wants to get into the publishing business is interspersed in passing, but is basically only important because this is how the relationship with Josephine came about. Otherwise, the stories largely focus on the relationships. In between there are typical short shared flat scenes in which Hanna comforts her roommate Tobi (Leonard Kunz) in his lovesickness or fools around with Holly (Bineta Hansen) after the two of them have eaten their homemade hash brownies; but even in these moments, the focus is on feelings because she is waiting for a message from Anouk. The woman knocked her down on the spot, and Krippendorff makes sure that this is very easy to understand: Larissa Sirah Herden is a hit. When Anouk also sings, Hanna is finally blown away. Singing is Herden’s main occupation (as a singer, she is called Lary), but she should definitely keep acting. However, Anouk is not the right woman for Hanna either; The search continues.
“Loving Her” (ZDFNeo): Without clichés and stereotypes
The art of scripts, which are based on a very similarly conceived Dutch model (“Anne +”, 2018), consists in reducing complexity: What is otherwise told in ninety minutes has to fit into a nutshell here and, if possible, without clichés and stereotypes get along. This works because Krippendorff selected the leading actresses in the episode excellently. Banafshe Hourmazdi is doing really well as a figure of identification anyway. As a narrator, she also guides you through the individual relationships. Because love is complicated and contradictory, Hanna’s occasional insights into her emotional world are a good addition, especially since she is silent at the right moments: the pretty medical student Sarah (Soma Pysall) is not clear about her feelings and does not even know whether she is a lesbian, so Krippendorf shows both variants on the split screen: happiness on the left, sorrow on the right.
The director is exactly the right person for such a material. Her coming-of-age drama “Kokon” (2020) was about a girl who discovered herself and the love for an older woman in a Berlin summer. The director had previously shot “Looping”; her feature film debut also told of a teenager’s search for love. According to Krippendorf, what makes Hanna’s experiences largely untold on German television is not the relationship structures or the reasons why Hanna falls in love, why she breaks hearts and her own is broken – it is solely the fact that a woman is women loves. “(Tilmann P. Gangloff)
