Frühling für Anfänger (2012)

In the small Bavarian village of “Frühling,” six-year-old Emma Gruber sets off alone on her bicycle to visit her grandfather at his mountain pasture. A neighbor sees her and informs Emma’s father, Georg. He tries to catch up with his daughter and arrives just after her white rabbit, “Ricky,” which she had impulsively brought along, has escaped. During the chase across the fields, Emma’s father suffers an acute bout of lumbago and is taken to the clinic. When Emma’s mother, Steffi, asks about her husband’s condition, the chief physician tells her that there have been complications. Because of an allergy to medication, her husband fell into a coma and, unfortunately, died. Katja Baumann is on her way to her new home with her seventeen-year-old daughter, Kiki. After separating from her husband, she has left everything behind, quit her job as a nurse, and now intends to work as a village helper in “Frühling.” Kiki wants absolutely nothing to do with living in this backwater, especially since she has only just returned from a year abroad. Before Katja even has time to unpack, she receives her first assignment. Because of Georg Gruber’s sudden death, his wife Steffi is unable to look after her father, Sepp, who is over eighty, lives all alone at his mountain pasture, and is quite difficult. Katja contacts Steffi Gruber, who tells her that she hopes her father might, in his old age, turn a little toward his daughter and granddaughter. So Katja sets off on the arduous journey to Sepp, the mountain farmer. She can take a chairlift for the first part of the way, but after that it is still a forty-minute hike up into the mountains. When she finally arrives, the old man leaves Katja standing outside his hut and silently shuts the windows. Having no other choice, Katja looks around the property and realizes that the cows have not been mucked out for days. Without hesitation, she fetches some farm tools and gets to work. When she is finished, she calls out toward the hut as she says goodbye, and Sepp secretly watches her through the windowpane. Meanwhile, Kiki explores the village and meets the Gmeiner family. Their son, Matze, takes an immediate interest in the young woman, but Kiki is extremely dismissive. She wants to get out of Frühling as soon as possible and calls her father, Peter, in Munich to ask him to come and get her. Baumann immediately gets into his car and drives to his daughter. But instead of taking her straight back to “civilization,” he wants to take a few days’ vacation first. Secretly, he hopes to win his wife back. When Katja returns after a tiring day and sees Peter, she is indignant. Without paying him any further attention, she spends the evening with the veterinarian, Mark Weber. During their conversation, she tells him about the cows at the mountain pasture and says she has the impression that many of them are sick. She asks him to take a look at the animals, and he reluctantly agrees. The next morning, Katja makes her way back to Sepp, undeterred. He again receives her in silence and treats her as if she were not there. A short while later, Mark Weber arrives and wonders why the animals are in the barn instead of out in the pasture. He says that, health-wise, they seem to be all right, and then helps Katja continue mucking out the barn. When Peter Baumann sees the two of them coming down from the mountain pasture together, looking close, his jealousy grows. He wants to talk to his wife, but Katja once again reproaches him for his infidelity. Kiki is fed up with her parents’ arguing again and escapes into the village, where she runs into Matze. This time, she is not so unfriendly toward him. The next day, Katja’s persistence brings its first success. Sepp no longer ignores her but finally speaks to her. Together they take the cows out to pasture, something he no longer felt able to do alone, which is why he had kept them in the barn for weeks. With each passing day, their relationship improves. The old man finally lets her help him and even cook for him. Katja senses, however, that he does not have a good relationship with his daughter. Since neither she nor her brother wanted to take over his farm, he had disowned his children. Katja wants the father and daughter to talk to each other. Steffi Gruber arrives at the mountain pasture with a doctor to have her father declared legally incompetent. Katja stands up for him, but to no avail. She feels betrayed by Steffi Gruber, realizing that Steffi was never interested in a reconciliation but had wanted from the beginning to get her father off the mountain pasture so she could sell it. Katja refuses to accept this. She visits Sepp at the nursing home and can hardly bear to see how much the old man is suffering. After all, he wanted to die on his farm, not in a home. But she also knows that father and daughter need to make an effort to reconcile. She manages to bring them together through Emma. The prospect of riding bicycles with his granddaughter prompts Sepp to learn to ride a bike first, with Katja’s help. When Steffi Gruber then sees her daughter and father together, she is so moved that she puts her plan to sell the mountain pasture on hold for the time being. Peter Baumann’s attempt to reconcile with his wife, Katja, comes to nothing; Katja sticks to the decision she has already made. However, she wants him to take Kiki with him to Munich so that Kiki can decide for herself what she really wants. Kiki is delighted at first, but then changes her mind when, already on the drive back to Munich, she sees Matze. She stays with her mother in “Frühling,” where she intends to start an internship.