Die Summe meiner einzelnen Teile (2011)

After a six-month stay in a psychiatric hospital, the unstable Martin learns that he will not get his job as a mathematician back. He collects his belongings from his ex-girlfriend, isolates himself, and drinks heavily. When he is evicted from his subsidized apartment and refuses any further help, he ends up living on the streets and protects ten-year-old Viktor, a Ukrainian boy who is also homeless after his alcoholic mother’s death, from some thugs. Although they can barely speak to each other, they become friends and build a life together in a nearby forest, supporting themselves by collecting bottles and committing petty thefts. Viktor tries hard to keep Martin from drinking. While collecting bottles, Martin finds a discarded letter and returns it to its intended recipient, Lena. They cautiously become friends. When the forestry authority responsible for the area has their hut in the forest demolished, Viktor disappears without a trace. Martin is arrested and admitted to the psychiatric hospital again (this scene is exactly the same as the one at the beginning of the film), but this time he manages to escape. During his escape, he steals a police officer’s service weapon and extorts money from a wealthy banker who hit him with his car months earlier and fled the scene. Martin wants to move with Viktor and Lena—who has given up her training as a dental assistant for his sake—to Portugal, where Lena’s ex lives in a hippie commune. On the way there, the police intercept him. At the end, he lies restrained in the psychiatric hospital while Lena and Viktor sit on a beach in Portugal. The film suggests that Viktor exists only in Martin’s imagination, although he is real to Martin. Viktor is absent during confrontations with the outside world (having coffee with Lena, the hut’s demolition, and the final arrest). Martin’s treating psychologist points out that, at Viktor’s age, Martin himself lost his Russian mother and was beaten by his single father. Several times, déjà vu episodes occur in which scenes from long ago are experienced again, calling the reliability of the narrative into question. In a subplot, Martin constantly calculates the digit sums of all the numbers or number sequences he encounters, such as prices of items while shopping or dates on a calendar. He avoids anything containing a 7. His childhood home, which he visits twice in the film, has the house number 70.