What is friendship? Is it the feeling for each other? Or are they shared experiences? Ulrich Matthes and Justus von Dohnányi find surprising answers.
Berlin – On the day of the funeral of Patrick’s wife Anja, Malte is in the parents’ house of his friend, whom he has not seen for 35 years. Actually, the widower just wanted to take his own life. The two start talking and it becomes clear that they have a lot more in common than the bittersweet memories of childhood and youth spent together in the provinces.
“Do you think there is an age at which you don’t make new friends,” Malte (Ulrich Matthes) asks his childhood friend Patrick (Justus von Dohnányi), whom he hasn’t seen for decades. “I don’t have a single friend,” he replies. “Maybe that’s because of the things that we no longer do together at our age,” he speculates. Building tree houses, recording mix tapes, swapping sex books and hairdressing mopeds are things that you share in your youth – and not as a seasoned mid-fifties.
But is it really experiences of this kind that are needed to establish a foundation for a choice connection in life? What is the essence of friendship? And: after a long time without contact, can you simply pick up where you left off? These are the questions that the only two characters in the chamber play “Friends” work on on Wednesday (from 8.15 p.m., Das Erste) in one hour and 31 minutes.
There is only one location in this film – namely Patrick’s parents’ house, where he lived with his wife for the last few months – until she died from cancer. The house looks strangely preserved and rigid. The furnishings are a mix of newer Ikea models and 1960s furniture. The only life left in this house is the old turtle Bruno with her brazen movements. Malte also knows the original animal from the times when he went in and out of this house.
On the day of the funeral of Patrick’s wife Anja, he comes to this house and prevents the suicide of the old friend who is done with life. But Malte, who now lives single in Stuttgart and runs a bookstore, never tires of promoting life in conversations the following night. “We’re not fat, we still have hair and a lot of life experience. Why shouldn’t anything work there? ”He says. “I feel much younger than I am.” – “I am much younger than I feel,” counters Patrick, tired and disaffected.
As a viewer, you get a bit afraid that the platitudes of the two men who are no longer so young, but not really old, will continue. But one has worried in vain. Because it is amazing how stimulating and inspiring the following dialogues are and that you as a viewer begin to wonder what your own attitude towards this topic is like. The fact is that the many first times together in a young life, through which friends accompany each other, create a strong bond that can function as a supporting pillar between two people for a lifetime.
But it’s not just a lot of experiences that connect Malte and Patrick here, because you learn that Malte was also together with Patrick’s deceased wife when she was young, before she fell in love with his boyfriend. And then there is also the son Vincent. The longed-for child of Patrick and Anja, who saw the light of day nine months after a short meeting between the ex-exes, Malte and Anja. “We have a child together!” Shouts Malte happily when he learns of fatherhood that night.
So there is plenty to talk about between the two of them. “Would you rather be dead now?” Malte asks his friend at the end of the night they spent together in Patrick’s parents’ house. “Nope,” he replies. What a beautiful declaration of love to his friend. dpa
