Ravioli (2003)

Heinz Hoschek, the protagonist and virtually the film’s sole leading character, is at the end of his rope. After his mother’s death, he returns to his parents’ empty apartment. His gambling-addicted father lives in a nursing home, his son—who is not very close to him—lives with his ex-wife, and he has also lost his job as deputy manager of a bank branch. From then on, he subsists mainly on canned beer and reheated canned ravioli. Under the influence of alcohol and Valium, the boundary between reality, memory, and imagination grows ever thinner, and in his thoughts he encounters his mother, Death, or the “Ghost of the ’70s.” Absurd visions of the afterlife as a mental hospital, an alternative ending to the story of the Trojan Horse, and personifications of the “beast within him” and his conscience reveal Hoschek’s tragicomic world, which he faces with cynicism and—seemingly—bitter resignation. He remembers vacations, his engagement, his job, his sixteenth birthday, and his school and university years, as well as his political involvement in the Socialist Youth and the Catholic Church. He begins seeing his old school friend Karin Weichselbaumer, who looks after her father, who lives above Hoschek. Shortly before his father dies as well, he decides to take a seasonal job as a lifeguard.