What Marielle Knows review – teenager's telepathic powers reveal parents' secrets and lies
Here is a high-concept satire of bourgeois family life with all its secrets and lies from German film-maker Frédéric Hambalek; it is something to remind you of the notorious Babel fish in Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which you can put in your ear and then comprehend what any creature in the universe is saying — a miraculous promotion of pure understanding which has been the cause of more and bloodier wars than anything else.
Marielle (Laeni Geiseler) is a moody and withdrawn teenager with messed-up parents. Her mum is Julia (Julia Jentsch, who 20 years ago memorably played anti-Nazi martyr Sophie Scholl) and dad is Tobias (Felix Kramer). Julia is on the verge of a furtive affair with work colleague Max (Mehmet Ateşçi) while Tobias is being turned into a beta-male joke at his publishing company – his cover design choice for a new novel is scorned by his underlings, and he's particularly undermined by a supercilious smoothie called Sören (Moritz Treuenfels).
It is at this fraught moment in their family history that a schoolfriend of Marielle's slaps her in the face for calling her a slut, and this trauma leaves Marielle with a superpower. She telepathically knows everything her parents are doing: her mum's secret smoking with Max and their hushed sex talk, and her dad's humiliation in the office. Something in the pure honesty and anger of that slap has endowed Marielle with the blazing insight and truth about parents who are living a placid life of dishonesty. Bewildered and panicky, she asks them for help getting rid of this burdensome and upsetting new power — they at first don't believe her, but a crisis dawns as they are confronted with the truth, not merely about Marielle's new abilities, but about their own lives.
It's a funny premise for a fantasy-satire, and it's very amusing when Julia and Tobias refuse to credit that it's happening and then try talking about it all in French in their bedroom so that their daughter can't telepathically listen in (her powers don't run to translation). But then what? How would a middle-aged couple really behave if they knew that their teenage daughter could see everything that they were doing? Would they, with hilarious unease, try to fabricate the ideal life they assume their daughter wants to see? Or would they think that this is absurd, so they might as well do what they wanted to do anyway? The movie comes up with differing answers to this question for Julia and Tobias, who are, after all, governed by gendered ideals about how a woman and a man should behave.
But the key fact is Julia's possible infidelity and this painful part of the story overwhelms the business about Marielle having telepathic powers, and so a lot of the comedy and absurdism of the film's starting point gets lost. Well, it could be that the whole point of the film isn't that Marielle's powers are special, but that they are universal – or almost. Teenage children, in their watchful silence, are very good at working out what their parents are really thinking and doing, and parents had better acknowledge that, and be honest with their children.
What Marielle Knows screened at the Berlin film festival.
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