Am Ende des Sommers (2015)

The film begins with a rape, although neither the perpetrator nor the victim nor the time of the crime can be made out. Eighteen-year-old Ben has just graduated with honors, and his 34-year-old mother, Sylvia Taudes, is very proud of him. She has a new suitor, Wolfgang. Ben takes a summer job, where he meets Hanna, and they begin a relationship. Ben is also warmly welcomed by Hanna’s family. When Ben playfully wrestles with his mother, she panics at his embrace. A scar on her hand points to an injury from long ago. Sylvia receives a surprising message in the mail that her father, Johann Taudes, has died; she throws the death notice into the wastebasket. Ben, however, believes his grandfather died a long time ago. He never knew his father, and Sylvia raised him on her own. She had told her son that he was a child of free love, conceived during a one-night stand with a chance InterRail acquaintance in Florence. While tidying up, Ben comes across the death notice and confronts his mother. Sylvia had wanted to prevent Ben from having contact with his grandfather, partly because her father had tried to force her to have an abortion. Ben goes to the cemetery where his grandfather is to be buried. He arrives too late for the funeral, and at the funeral meal at an inn, he meets several relatives as well as Gerti, Sylvia’s school friend. From her, he learns that his mother may never have been to Florence. Sylvia and Gerti last met at a trial in Vienna. Gerti will not tell him what the trial was about. So Ben confronts his mother again. She admits that he was not conceived out of pure love, but in a rape. Ben decides to search for his father. Gerti tells him his name: Alfred Mühlberger. At the time, he was a guest at the Hotel Mariandl in Spitz, where Gerti and Sylvia had summer jobs. According to a newspaper report from that time, he was sentenced to two years in prison for the rape, with one year suspended. Ben eventually visits his father at his farm, without initially revealing his identity. He leaves only the newspaper report about the rape and Mühlberger’s conviction. After Ben reveals who he is to Mühlberger, he briefly strikes his father, runs off, and returns to his mother, saying, “I don’t need a father.”