With LIEBHABERINNEN (WOMEN AS LOVERS), I continued the search I had already started in my short films: a filmic language that does not reconcile, explain, or redeem. This film is – with thanks to Elfriede Jelinek – an anti-romantic tragicomedy, a heterosexual horror movie. Analytical incisiveness meets an intentionally malicious gaze. Here, humour is not consolation, but instead a survival strategy: ‘Sometimes the hunter is worse off than the game’, wrote Jelinek in her 1975 novel, and the same applies today to both of the film’s protagonists.
Two women are at the centre: Brigitte and Paula. Both rebel against a system which promises women self-actualisation while simultaneously playing them against one another. This film’s real conflict does not only play out between men and women, but also between the women: between mother and daughter, between colleagues, between role models and figures of deterrence. These battles are almost always lost.
I’m interested in female solidarity where it breaks down. How do women sabotage themselves? Through resentment, through overly-specific criticism, through the unconscious perpetuation of misogynistic value measurements. Misogyny does not only function from the outside – it mercilessly differentiates between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ women and is thereby internalised.
Brigitte is a dialectical character, she believes in success, encounters violence, and in the end learns the price of that success. Her story does not lead her to freedom, but to a golden cage. Paula, on the other hand, lands precisely in the position that Brigitte was almost destroyed by. Of all people, Brigitte’s mother is the only character who shows real solidarity at a decisive moment. She rescues Paula from the village into supposed freedom. This reversal is the core of the film.
For me, the LIEBHABERINNEN are also a grotesque, distorted version of reality in which the working environment, the pressure to be efficient, desires and feminism become an absurd battle zone. Reality itself has turned grotesque – the film merely puts it in the spotlight. Hopes topple over, expectations backfire, and what begins as emancipation often ends as a new form of discipline.
The score is also used specifically for this purpose: familiar melodies by Mozart which sharpen the film’s satirical character rather than polishing emotions. As in a comedy à la ‘The Marriage of Figaro’, power and gender keep the characters in constant motion – but the laughter remains painful. Despite all its humour, LIEBHABERINNEN is for me a deeply tragic film, a heterosexual nightmare even. It hits you right where you recognise yourself. No character stands above the others, nobody is morally superior. Everyone is damaged, everyone ensnared, everyone both perpetrator and victim. This is precisely where empathy and imposition coincide.
Koxi
