Agnes und seine Brüder

Agnes’s brothers are Jörg (Moritz Bleibtreu) and Werner (Herbert Knaup). Jörg is a sexually-obsessed librarian, whose workspace is continually flooded by scantily-clad nubile students, but whose desires only lead to isolation. Werner is a successful career politician, a Grüne hypocrite with the predilection for sausage on the barbecue. The façade of his marriage to the self-aware (and hysterical) Signe (Katja Riemann), with whom he has two sons, starts to display cracks. Agnes herself (Martin Weiss) was once a man, but changed sex for ‘her’ great love. Now Agnes works as a dancer in nightclubs. What links the brothers is a painful relationship with their eccentric, rich father. Agnes und seine Brüder is partly grotesque entertainment and melodrama, with an opening scene that pays homage to Fassbinder’s In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden; partly social satire, as Roehler exaggerates his characters and situations in which they find themselves, but avoids the free-for-all of a caricature. Roehler: ‘Basically it’s a film about a lost generation. Because what else are the children of 1968? In some way or another, they are deserted, neglected children whose parents have remained stuck in their own ego trips.’ At present, Roehler is working on a film version of Michel Houellebecq’s Elementary Particles. (GT)