Director Vera wants to remake Fassbinder‘s THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT for television. A few days before the shoot she still doesn‘t have a protagonist. The casting agent begins to lose her patience with the director‘s antics, the producer turns his back on the funding institutions even though he doesn‘t know half of what‘s going wrong. Only Gerwin (Andreas Lust), who has played against Ursina Lardi, Corinna Kirchhof, Andrea Sawatzki, and Marie-Lou Sellem in the audtions, still enjoys working on the project. The fact that Vera is without a protagonist – Fassbinder seems to believe the TV audience could only handle a heretosexual pairing – causes Gerwin‘s half-dormant career ambitions to flare up. What follows is an ambiguous, ludicrous, and smart intimate play about the vanity and hierarchies in the relations during the production and gender relations.

Wackerbarth‘s film is a projection of Fassbinder-like poetics into the German cinema landscape of the present, and not only because of the references and quotes that CASTING elegantly interlaces. It would be a misunderstanding to view CASTING as sheer satire, since it doesn‘t use protective irony, it takes matters that seem laughable very seriously. The German comedy manages the rare feat of getting its funniest moments where it hurts the most. An escalating drama that is captivating from start to finish with all the delight and pain that goes along with it.

Sebastian Markt

Translation: Elinor Lewy