If you love travel documentaries, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish one from the other. Dreamlike landscape joins dreamlike landscape, in between protagonists on search for meaning. The subgenre has long switched to autopilot. Maria Ehrich and Manuel Vering's self-discovery trip reminds strongly in terms of content as well as formally on "Reiß aus Zwei Menschen". Two years. A dream, which came to the German cinemas in March 2019. A kind of documentary cloning that still makes a few things different.
Here's how a couple packs the suitcases and comments on their business venture. Here and there, there is a dispute at some point, because the long squat is a stress test for the relationship. And here and there, the protagonists not only talk about themselves, but pick out a handful of interesting personalities on the way to introduce them to the cinema audience. Instead of retelling their journey in chronological order, however, they sort the events collected on the way thematically and do not turn every encounter with strangers into a positive experience. Apart from that, but also travels this documentary well-known streets.
Maria Ehrich is an actress and in crisis. The job offers are missing, she has doubts about her talent. So the leading actress known from the gemstone trilogy (ruby red, sapphire blue, emerald green) travels with her boyfriend. His name is Manuel Vering, is a journalist and constantly armed with a camera. He knows how to photograph his photogenic girlfriend as well as nature spectacularly.
Like almost all documentary films about traveling, Leaving the Frame looks fantastic too. The colors are strong and bright, the aerial drone shots are particularly spectacular and would suit any large-scale production. Whether Vering is occupationally concerned with it or has reached such mastery as a hobby filmmaker remains an open question. On the homepage to the film he calls himself only as a "camera nerd". In general, the audience learns little about him. Although the film is primarily about Ehrich, who takes over much of the narration. Consequently, she would have had to travel alone.
Refreshing is, however, that Ehrich and Vering do not tell their travel experiences linear throughout, but along a thematic red thread. From her itinerary, which leads her from Kenya via Belize and Mexico, across the United States and to Newfoundland, they turn off again and again, returning to an earlier point. Then they stand in a national park in the US, wondering about the few birds and look back from there to Kenya, where they talk with a conservationist about the bird dying.
Interviews with previously researched interlocutors like this, however, convince only rudimentary. The idea behind not bringing the next completely self-centered circumnavigation of the globe to being "more than just tourists," as Ehrich put it, is stronger than the result. The conversations - among others with a nun caring for orphans and a painter and Holocaust survivor - are of very different quality. Especially the latter remains superficial. Here you notice the young Ehrich simply her inexperience as a journalist. In the end, the conversations seem like a fig leaf, which is intended to cover up the fact that only two tourists were on the move again, who want to refinance their search for meaning. Of course, the book on the film is already at the bookseller. Talk show appearances for promotional purposes are compulsory.
If you have seen more than one of these travel tips or read travel reports in this format, you do not need to look at Leaving the Frame. The gain in knowledge remains manageable: traveling expands the horizon, because travelers have to leave their familiar environment, their frame (as the title implies), and look at themselves from a different perspective. If you can not get enough of postcard views of the world, do not go wrong here.
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