Having agonised at length over the logistics of filming the life of playwright Bertold Brecht, screenwriter Klaus Pohl and director Jan Schutte eventually opted for a novel approach. Subtitled Brecht's Last Summer, The Farewell shelves the life and cuts straight to the death.
It unfolds through one dawn-till-dusk day in the August of 1956, Schutte's camera ambling leisurely around a lakeside summer house in Brandenburg. The result is part-Ulysses, part- portrait of the artist as an ageing stud.
Nestled at the film's centre sits Josef Bierbichler's effective portrayal of the Brecht of popular myth, hunched in his work clothes over a typewriter as he pops his heart pills, cuts a fart and scowls behind thick-framed specs like a bulldog chewing a wasp. Orbiting him are Brecht's women: his wife, his daughter, an adoring young assistant, the neurotic ex-mistress and the philosopher's wife he is banging on the side.
To all intents and purposes, the setting is that of a bucolic summer idyll. But storm-clouds are gathering in the shape of secret police who have set up checkpoints in order to snare a political dissident. Mrs Brecht knows of the impending crisis but has kept him in the dark, mindful of her husband's failing health.
The basic plot furniture of The Farewell is that of a drawing-room comedy, full of incessant comings and goings, romantic misunderstandings and heated squabbles around the luncheon table. What's different is the tone and tempo.
Perhaps mindful of the fatal finale up ahead, Schutte's film appears in no rush to get there. On the contrary, it fairly luxuriates in its sombre ambience, trailing its hero as he shuffles between his ladies, now more a sexual voyeur than a participant. So Brecht sits in his armchair and watches as his assistant goes skinny-dipping in the lake. The cinema- tography is a wash of amber; the soundtrack a hum of lapping waves and distantly barking dogs, all underpinned by a tinkling, minor-key piano score from John Cale.
Like Brecht, you find yourself drifting slowly towards an eternal sleep.
At the Odeon West End 2, London WC2 (020-7928 3232), tonight.
