In This Very Moment

Two children arguing in the car can get on your last nerve. Lea and Konstantin are the names of the two siblings who are picked up by stepmother Sylvia in the car on their way to school. As the bickering and annoyance increases, Sylvia unceremoniously throws the children out of the car and drives off. The children are left on their own in Poland, where their mother actually wanted to go shopping. An odyssey through a strange world begins for brother and sister. Their destination: home and their loving father, who pulls out all the stops in Germany to find the supposedly abducted children. Sylvia doesn't tell anyone about the abandonment of the children and the previous quarrels - out of fear for the relationship and of the justified accusations. An evil stepmother and two children abandoned in the wilderness looking for their way home to their father: That sounds like Hansel and Gretel. But Christoph Hochhäusler ("Falscher Bekenner") doesn't make it that simple in his feature film debut. The stepmother is not just evil and the children are not just innocent. Above all, the inexplicable coldness and the touches of cruelty displayed by the little girl Lea remain unexplained. "Milchwald" turns out to be an oppressive family tragedy in the guise of a dark fairy tale set in the region around the German-Polish border. Hochhäusler has clothed his road movie in the neighboring country in strictly composed shots and static camera images that convey a sense of oppression rather than an atmosphere of travel and new beginnings. This creates a paradoxical effect: although the landscape opens up in the vastness, it gives the impression of narrowness and hopelessness. "On an equal footing with the children's adventures is the tale of woe of the stepmother, a fragile woman who is just as unable to cope with the rejection she experiences, especially from Lea, as she is with the chilly atmosphere that prevails in the proper prefabricated house that the father has built for his family. Her helplessness is evident in her fidgety little gestures as she waits for her husband between sterile walls, restless as an animal in a cage. When he comes home, nothing gets better: she struggles for his love, but cannot talk about what has happened. And becomes increasingly silent. [...] The film, as the images make clear from the outset, is above all a study of loneliness. At times, "Milchwald" is reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman's work: how the characters are usually not presented in pairs or groups, but in close-ups, isolated in the frame, how they are pushed to the edge, lost under a wide sky, in a deep space, on an empty street, how distances are torn open between them. The visual realization of the film is astonishingly consistent, almost merciless in its depiction of the world as an emotional ice house.[...] Hochhäusler does not explain the cold from which his characters suffer.He just shows it, without compromise."(Felicitas Kleiner, at: www.filmdienst.de)