Schluckauf

One day the extravagant model Chantal returns to her Berlin apartment, where the downtrodden Gertie is waiting for her. Gertie tells her that they had met at a fashion show in her home town and that the diva had invited her to visit. Despite the initial conflict, the two women eventually begin to grow closer. As both of their lives descend into chaos, Gertie tries to find herself and Chantal’s showy facade begins to crumble. Director and screenwriter Roland Klick conceived the story of the two women’s unusual friendship as a phantasmagorical bildungsroman about the formation of personal identity. The narrative is intentionally and playfully exaggerated and it abounds with self-reflexive overstatement, obtrusive genre allusions, impressive interpolations and fantastical twists. The affected hyper-expressiveness superbly reveals the inner world of the characters and helps to uncover the essence of their dominant-submissive relationship with constantly alternating roles. Roland Klick’s filmography is full of bizarre circumstances of origin, creative conflicts and obstacles that the distinctive filmmaker had to overcome to fulfil his vision. In the end, however, Klick was always supported by his audience. Therefore, the straw that broke the back of his creative career was fittingly neither the maniacal, drug-addled Dennis Hopper, thanks to whom the filming of White Star could have ended in disaster, nor the arrogant initiative undertaken by the proponents of the “New German Cinema” that brought about the withdrawal of Deadlock from competition at Cannes. The most severe blow to Klick’s career was delivered by his otherwise seemingly least demanding project, Hiccup, which became a shining example of the authority exercised by the film fund, which, based on its assessment that the film did not contribute to improving the quality of German cinema, withdrew the grant originally awarded to the production and essentially confiscated the film. Hiccup thus never made it to cinemas. In connection with the struggle associated with this turn of events, Klick said that he saw filmmaking as a devastating addiction that he had to break in his own interest. [written for the 2018 Summer Film School] (2022.04.18)