After the scandalous film “Wetlands” and the Hitler satire “He’s back” David Wnendt now provides lighter material. His Hollywood debut “The Sunlit Night” leads to the Lofoten Islands.
Los Angeles – Can the New York art student Frances find her life in the midnight sun on the lonely Lofoten, where it never gets dark in summer?
In the funny and dramatic work “The Sunlit Night”, his English-language feature film debut, the German director David Wnendt pursues this question in a very enjoyable and completely scandal-free manner.
From the much-praised maker of the social drama “Kriegerin” to the neo-Nazi scene and the scandalous film “Wetlands” one is used to harder things. The native of Gelsenkirchen also startled the audience with the Hitler satire “He’s back” and the brutal crime scene crime thriller “Borowski and the dark net”.
Now, with plenty of sunlight and without controversy, Wnendt embarks on a playful but at the same time profound journey to the edge of the Arctic Circle. Its protagonist Frances has good reason to flee New York. Everything goes wrong there in the first few minutes of the movie. An abstract painting by the young artist is mercilessly panned by a committee. “It leaves me cold,” one of the professors blasphemed. Your boyfriend broke up, the internship in Tokyo was busting. And in the cramped, parental apartment, where her sister also lives, there is trouble. The parents separate, the frustration is perfect.
Every job is right there. Also as the assistant of a quirky artist in the barren Lofoten, who needs someone to paint his barn installation yellow. “Okay, that fits,” Frances agrees immediately. With the US comedian Jenny Slate (“Saturday Night Live”) Wnendt could not have done better. She plays Frances, whose life is completely wrong, with a wonderful carelessness. Not even the grumpy painter Nils Auermann (Fridtjov Såheim) can harm her with his gruff manner.
She lives in a caravan, including a goat, with a view of the ice-blue sea and wide mountains. In this environment, Frances meets weird characters. In a Viking village for tourists, she meets the bearded American Haldor (Zach Galifianakis), who takes his role as a Viking very seriously. A young saleswoman in a grocery store who appears to Frances like a beauty from a Renaissance painting becomes her nude model.
The quiet, sad Yasha, whom Frances compares to a young man from a famous Caravaggio painting, also ended up in Lofoten for a strange reason. The looming romance comes to a surprising end. “The X-Files” star Gillian Anderson is also involved in a small supporting role.
Frances puts her heart and soul into the arctic adventure. Their self-discovery ripples aimlessly along, but it is precisely these small moments that make “The Sunlit Night” so attractive. Wnendt was based on the debut novel of the same name by US author Rebecca Dinerstein Knight, who herself lived in Lofoten for over a year. For Frances, the expedition ends with a big scandal and then with a happy ending. The art professors are impressed. “The look is light and radiant, it looks so lively,” the experts in New York praise one of their new nudes. “Where was that?” The teachers wonder.
– The Sunlit Night, Germany, Norway 2019, 91 min., FSK from 12, by David Wnendt, with Jenny Slate, Fridtjov Såheim, Alex Sharp, Gillian Anderson, Zach Galifianakis. dpa
