Die andere Heimat – Chronik einer Sehnsucht (Edgar Reitz, 2013)

In Home from Home: Chronicle of a Vision, a prequel to his acclaimed Heimat TV film series, Reitz takes us back to the village of Schabbach of 1842, suffering disease and oppression under the Prussian yoke and with anyone still young and able emigrating for the new world in droves. The main character is a hopeless dreamer, studying Amazonian tribal languages as he fantasises about leaving for Brazil, embittered when his brother beats him to it and strands him to continue the struggling family business.
It's lustrous to look at, shot in monochrome but with unexpected flashes of colour, and there is a real sense of period too, which combine to make the running length of nearly four hours not drag at all despite the events largely being a continual cycle of hardship and death. However, as always with Reitz, perhaps most reminiscently of 1979's The Tailor from Ulm, but also with the '60s-set episodes of Heimat, there is a critical fault in asking the audience to empathise with a protagonist who lives in cloud-cuckoo land to the detriment of both himself and those around him: it's not enough to be a romantic to elicit our love. Reitz has never quite got this, and it's always a pity when in other aspects his films offer so much in terms of mood and beauty.

6/10