Sommergäste (1976)
No stats available
Directors
Cast
Wolf Redl, Edith Clever, Ilse Ritter, Michael König, Jutta Lampe, Bruno Ganz, Otto Sander, Elke Petri
At a rural summer dacha in tsarist Russia, a group of prosperous vacationers confronts the dissatisfaction and social uncertainty beneath their comfortable lives.
The story
In tsarist Russia shortly after the turn of the century, thirteen middle- and upper-class vacationers gather at a countryside dacha surrounded by forest. The group includes professionals, a former factory owner, and the wife of an unscrupulous lawyer, who is troubled by an unfulfilled life. Despite their prosperity and social advancement, the guests feel dissatisfied and uncertain about their place in the world. They spend much of their time talking, arguing, complaining, and reproaching one another. As their conversations grow more tense, they begin to sense that profound social upheavals are approaching and that their comfortable, self-centered existence may not survive them.
Full plot (contains spoilers)
In tsarist Russia, shortly after the turn of the century. The setting: a summer dacha in the countryside, surrounded by forest. Thirteen vacationers meet there, all members of the middle and upper classes. Among them are a doctor, a writer, an engineer, a former factory owner, a widowed female doctor, and the wife of an unscrupulous lawyer, who suffers from an unfulfilled life because she has no children. They have all worked their way up, risen socially, or married well. In their complacency, these summer guests no longer feel comfortable in their own skins: they are prosperous bourgeois citizens, yet deeply dissatisfied. One of them says, “We are summer guests in our own country. We belong nowhere. We do nothing. We just talk an awful lot.” As the story unfolds, they discuss and complain, debate and lament almost constantly. Many of the summer guests do not know what to do with their lives, are plagued by pangs of conscience, and continually interrupt one another with reproaches, self-recriminations, and sentimentality. The mood grows increasingly tense, and the people present gradually begin to realize, amid their bourgeois complacency, that profound social upheavals are approaching—upheavals in which self-centered people like them will have no place. In the end, it is above all the women who break out of their formerly idle lives; some leave their husbands in order to give their lives a new purpose.
Genres
Film metadata comes from the open sources listed in Credits & Contact. Catalogue details may be incomplete.
Your lists
Loading your lists…