Agnes and His Brothers

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***

Difficult to embrace but ever harder to dismiss, Oskar Roehler's Agnes and His Brothers offers one of the most dysfunctional bourgeois families on record, from whom the writer/director slowly draws function. That the pathway/minefield toward said goal is long, somewhat labored and often licentious may prove as off-putting as it is enticing. Much attention has been paid to one brother's choice of office rather than bathroom for an evacuation. Yet, given the time (midway into a political phone conversation in which he's calling in his chits), health and history (environmental/Green Party demonstrations), even this oddity might be accepted as understandable, if bizarre. And what to make of another brother's sex obsession? Whatever we make of it, he ends up putting it to surprisingly astute use. Third bro, the titular Agnes, is fairly far into a sex change when nature--via hormones or disease--changes the course of things.

Along the way--Roehler's pacing and switching between brothers is rudimentary--we also meet family, friends, employees and co-workers. There's a nasty/nutty pater familias, a dead mother; a wife who has had it with her hubby, and offspring who are angry distant, and sad (is one perhaps adopted?). An ex-boyfriend reappears; he's now famous, though for what we never learn. The moviemaker tells us oodles about some things (Hans-Jorg's ladies-room forays for masturbation) and almost nothing about others (mom, boyfriend, younger sibling). Yet, if we simply mull things over, plot and people fall into place rather easily and believably, despite all the odd behavior on view; moment to moment, the movie works. This is due in no small part to its exceptionally talented cast.

Mr. Sex-Obssessed is played by Moritz Bleibtreu, one of Germany's finest young actors (The Experiment, Taking Sides, Run Lola Run, In July), and he is as good--and different--here as he's ever been. Herbert Knaup (Anatomy) makes his evacuating environmentalist equal parts suppressed fury and increasing desperation. You can understand why his wife (the award-winning Katja Riemann of The Harmonists and Rosenstrasse) hates him, but you'll still wish him well. As Agnes, whose character is the least defined of the three brothers, Martin Weiss possesses such facial beauty (s/he's a cross between Garbo and Dietrich) that this very nearly becomes character.

There is humor here, if bleak and dark; feeling too, even if the approach is too distant and non-cliché for anything like sentimentality (the director flirts with it toward the end, but his refusal to provide all the answers helps bypass this). It is hard to imagine that you, too, will not have a mixed reaction to Agnes and His Brothers. Whatever our judgment, however, I have a sneaky feeling that Roehler has managed to make exactly the movie he wanted.