Schöne Tage (1982)

The film depicts the brutality of a Pinzgau farmer and the great hardship and lowly status of his male and female farmhands. The story, however, has been relocated to a farm in Carinthia. It also addresses the situation of servants who had secret affairs, whose children were in turn made into laborers by the farmers. Six-year-old Franzi lives with his mother, Olga, in a small apartment behind a railway station. He is sad because he already knows he is going to be sent away. On the day he leaves, his mother comforts him, saying he will have a good life at the farm belonging to his real father. His stepfather accompanies him. When they arrive at the farm, his real father proves to be a spiteful, violent farmer who speaks contemptuously about Franzi: “So this is my youthful indiscretion.” At first, the farmhands burst out laughing in front of the stepfather, on the pretext that things are always so cheerful in the country. Franzi has no appetite, but his father forces him to eat. Neither the farmer nor his wife responds to Franzi’s homesickness; they tell him that the farm is his new home now. While mowing the meadows, the farmhands are driven to exhaustion by the head farmhand, whereupon Franzi runs into the empty house next to the farm. Afterward, he is tied to the horse that pulls the wagon carrying away the mown grass. Under the farm’s miserable conditions, Franzi becomes a bedwetter. When Franzi starts attending elementary school, he is very shy, and when his father catches him doing his homework, he angrily sends him off to work. Soon afterward, the welfare authorities bring Maria, a little girl who does not know her mother, to the farm. The farmhand Höller refuses to work on Sunday. Because Franzi was not at Sunday Mass, that evening his father makes him beg for a beating. His cries of pain can be heard all over the farm. Afterward, Franzi has to thank his father for the beating. Eventually, Franzi finds refuge with Moritz, an old, overworked, mute farmhand. Moritz lets him watch as he repairs a pocket watch, then shows him his room and his collection of clocks, which greatly angers the farmer. In summer, the farmer and Franzi drive the cows out to pasture, and the farmer beats him in the meadow for disobedience. Now everything is over for Franzi. He wrecks his room, burns his schoolbooks, and escapes by train to Olga, his mother, with whom he lived until a year earlier. He wants to stay with her, but she refuses to take him in, especially since she has other children to care for, and takes him back to the terrible farm. When Franzi returns from a medical examination, the farmhand Moritz has an accident with the horse-drawn wagon he has loaded with milk cans. As Franz enters puberty, the harassment intensifies. Like the other farmhands, he has to do grueling work. He continues to wet the bed. After climbing up to the alpine hut, Franz finds a dead stag, which he greatly admires, and writes about the experience in a school essay. A rumor spreads around the farm that Maria has become pregnant by the farmhand Höller. Maria then flees on her bicycle, struggling her way through the passing Corpus Christi procession. At the altar on her farm, the procession finds Höller hanging. When no bells ring at Höller’s funeral, Franz uses the rope to set the bells ringing, which gets him into trouble with his teacher. Franz has to read his strange essay about the dead stag to the class, whereupon his classmates laugh at him. When his school years end, his school friend Leo keeps quiet about a vacant mechanic’s apprenticeship and takes it for himself. Meanwhile, a midwife has been hired at Franz’s farm, and she speaks frankly to the farming couple about the social injustices there. Franz feels a certain affection for the midwife and writes to ask her to stay at the farm forever. She turns him down. Franz is now desperate and already having thoughts of suicide. But he changes his mind. The following summer, a tractor is demonstrated to the farming couple, with Franz at the wheel. Everyone then hangs on to the tractor’s rope, and its pulling power drags them all along. At the clothing store, the farmer’s wife refuses to give Franz the suit he wants, but he goes ahead regardless. Soon afterward, Franz asks about an apprenticeship at a mechanic’s workshop where his friend Leo is already training. The master has already spoken to his father about Franz’s alleged laziness and rejects his application. Not long afterward, Franz receives a letter offering him an apprenticeship as a blacksmith. He rides there by bicycle, throwing his suitcase and everything in it into a stream along the way. At the smithy, he feels better than he ever has before. Meanwhile, the farmhand Moritz has died, and Franz’s stepsister opens and reads Franz’s last letter to Moritz aloud to the farmer’s wife. The farmer is not at all pleased and tells Franz to stay on the farm. The film ends on an open note.