Gesicht der Erinnerung (2022)

Christina, a physiotherapist in Salzburg, shares an apartment and a practice with her friend Antje, a single mother. A childless single woman, the 36-year-old is as regular a fixture at parties as she is in psychotherapy. One night, after collapsing while dancing, she is driven home by a young man, a brief chance acquaintance. Unbeknownst to her, he stays until morning, then says goodbye with an invitation to see his band perform. In the days that follow, he keeps pursuing her until a massage appointment, which he manages to arrange with Antje’s help, brings them physically close enough to tip the balance in his favor. Patrick is barely 20, but charming and attractive. Christina, for her part, has experience with relationships involving a large age gap. She was 16 when she first fell deeply in love—with Jacob, a 39-year-old family man, who died in an accident on the night he planned to run away with her. She has never been able to get over him. Meeting Patrick only deepens her fixation, since he resembles Jacob in many ways. But another coincidence makes Patrick uneasy, too: when Christina tells him where and when Jacob’s accident happened—to prove that Patrick could not have known him—the place and time are almost identical to those of Patrick’s birth. The following evening brings the newly enamored couple together all the more naturally in the present: Christina sees Patrick perform for the first time, which spurs him on as he sings a love song intended for her. She is so delighted that she rushes to him and stands at his side for the finale, accompanied by the applause of those around them. This finally makes them a couple. Antje, who repeatedly checks in afterward to make sure Christina is really feeling better, helps bring this about by moving out of their shared apartment temporarily. The introductory visit to Patrick’s very wealthy parents goes well, too. But neither of them has yet managed to break free of the ties to the past: Christina remains obsessed with turning Patrick into a revenant of Jacob, while Patrick is still caught up with an ex-girlfriend who wants revenge for being rejected and intends to outdo Christina as a rival. Only when he introduces the ex to his parents as well does an intimate conversation with Anna, the longtime housekeeper, and a childhood memory that she triggers in a flash set him on the path back to Christina. But there is no going back. That very night, while he was stranded at his ex’s place, Christina was taken to the emergency room after collapsing severely in the street. The diagnosis: a brain tumor. She euphemistically calls the growth her “enemy” when she tells Patrick, who finds her—with Antje’s help once again—in a small Italian mountain village, at a kind of guesthouse called Casa di Cura (literally, “care home,” though in practice seemingly a hospice for the terminally ill). Everything points to Christina having little time left. Knowing this, she had already chosen the place where she intends to end her life by suicide before Patrick arrives. Now she does so with Patrick’s knowledge and in his presence. He stays in the area for three more years, repeatedly drawn back to the “crime scene,” a steep ravine, until a conversation between a mother and daughter that he happens to overhear seems to release him: little Elena, just as he himself did in his distant childhood, gives herself a new name. She calls herself Christina.