Elementarteilchen, in German with subtitles

Directed by Oskar Roehler

After a day of great films at the Transilvanian Film Festival (TIFF) in Cluj, I was persuaded to go along to the late-night showing of this by friends keen to see it who had all read the book on which it is based, by Michel Houellebecq, a cult favourite in its time. The protagonists are two half-brothers, sons of a hippy mother, who have been unaware of each other's existence until adulthood, and are as unalike as can be. Michael is a brilliant but dull scientist with no emotional life; Bruno is an unbalanced, unhappy teacher who can't keep his thoughts off sex (except with his wife).

Moritz Bleibtreu does his best with the highly unsympathetic Bruno, while Christian Ulmen sleepwalks through his role as Michael, expressing boffin-like disengagement with a tip of his head, a half smile, and a flare of his nostrils. The plot is hackneyed, the characterisation poor, it has every cliche in the book, and worst of all it tries to bamboozle the audience with solemn faux-scientific talk, all sorts of nonsense about world-shattering gene research which were are meant to believe boring old Michael has discovered. The ultimate McGuffin. The tone is very strange: the audience didn't know whether they were supposed to laugh at the absurd situations... but they did. It should either be bleakly funny or appalling when a son shouts at his mother on her death bed. Here it was just embarrassing. 

Both find, yawn, a kind of salvation in a woman's arms - Michael's rediscovered old love is just so heavily flagged it's a relief when it happens. Bruno's game gal is discovered in a hot tub at a hippy camp (oh no) and soon donning her shiny black dominatrix gear (oh no no no) and leading him off to a swingers club. The audience thought it was a hoot.

'Bittersweet' endings have to be really good to work. This one was just sickening, and caused more merry laughter. It's one thing to make a sentimental romance out of stock melodrama situations, with cancer, paralysis and the spirits of the departed thrown in... it's quite another to put on a serious face and pretend it's all terribly meaningful in a universal way. According to my companions M Houellebecq's book is rather different and totally bleak in its ending. But I still won't be reading any of his novels.