Nadine carefully approaches the excitedly snorting animal, snuggles up to its body, strokes its fur soothingly. The cow, named Paul, gradually calms down and soon appears before Nadine (Aenne Schwarz) as a somewhat sheepish-looking boy who insists on apologizing to the boss for his outburst.
Which is exactly what “Mr. Lichter” does in the form of a good-natured, cute teenager, before returning to Nadine as a motherly older woman and their children. The “real” Paul (Carlo Ljubek) is slow to appear. For the time being, he only appears as an image in photographs and on a different timeline.
It is not Kafkaesque metamorphoses that take place in “Alle die du bist” by Michael Fetter Nathansky, but rather the literal perception of various – strongly typified – personality facets and roles.
Alternative perspectives
It takes a while to perceive Paul’s transformation (referred to in the credits as “Paul Young”, “Paul Woman”, “Paul Child” and “Paul Animal”) not primarily as a staging device, but as an alternative way of looking at things, and the duplication is not always productive. But when Paul ends up trotting around after his boss as a cow at his new job, the initial playfulness gives way to a bitter social diagnosis.
“All that you are” is the portrait of an exhausted woman whose love for her husband is slipping away. Michael Fetter Nathansky (co-author of Sophie Linnenbaum’s film “The Ordinaries”) embeds the loss of love firmly in the working world of the Rhenish lignite industry, which is threatened by structural change. Nadine, a mechanical engineer and mother of two, came to Cologne from Brandenburg many years ago and is a fighter on various fronts.
As the union leader, she tries to avert impending layoffs; for her husband Paul, who occasionally suffers from panic attacks, she repairs the damage caused and fights for second chances.
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And Nadine – and with her the actress Aenne Schwarz – throws herself into the ring with wild determination to win back love.
Nadine was not always the woman who cared. In the flashback, which is marked by a narrower image format and a warm lighting atmosphere, she initially appears as a harsh person who avoids glances and seems strangely numb. It is only when she meets the impulsive worker Paul in the factory (the other Pauls are played by Youness Aabaz, Jule Nebel-Linnenbaum and Sammy Schrein) that she is able to break free from her rigidity.
Collision, excitement and friction
Despite all the tenderness, Nathansky presents the couple’s encounter primarily as the encounter between two energetic bodies. And Nadine’s dwindling feelings seven years later are also expressed primarily as a physical unfamiliarity.
Paul’s smell is foreign to her, and she doesn’t recognize his smile. At one point she approaches the sleeping body as if it were an alien species, carefully sniffs it, takes hold of his hand and looks at it as if it were a strange object.
“All That You Are,” which premiered in February at the Berlinale in the Panorama section, is an action film of its own kind. Nathansky and his cinematographer Jan Maynz tell the story with a forward-moving drive and a focus on collision, excitement and friction.
By combining social realism and magical storytelling, the director, who was born in Cologne in 1993 and trained at the Babelsberg Film University, is breaking new ground in (younger) German cinema. It is the same unrestrained zeal with which Nadine campaigns for falling in love again that Nathansky uses to fight for a romantic-utopian way of thinking that nevertheless never loses touch with social reality.
The wear and tear of emotions is a product of economic conditions, as Paul knows when he addresses his complaint to a representative of the factory management: “I’m going to sue you. Because my wife doesn’t love me anymore.”