When Ingeborg Bachmann (Vicky Krieps) visits Max Frisch (Ronald Zehrfeld) in Zurich for the first time, the following dialog occurs. After he shows her his apartment, opens the door to the living room and says “...but we won’t talk about literature today any more.” “What else should we talk about?” asks Bachmann. “About your smile,“ answers Frisch.

The scene sums up what Margarethe von Trotta is focused on in her biopic. She gives a look into the failure of the relationship. What’s primarily at fault are the social norms and Frisch’s traditional ideas about women that ensures that though he admires Bachmann’s work a lot, he prefers talking about his girlfriend’s smile. He doesn’t like her independence, her affairs, her refusal to marry him. He calls her “my girl“ and turns her into an object of his literature. She accuses him of betrayal for that reason. After she moves in with him in Zürich, she loses her rhythm and her place. She can’t write next to the clacking of his typewriter and under his supervision and without a decent espresso. She moves to her beloved Rome. In a key scene, Bachmann explains that marriage is the end for women who want to work. “Fascism begins in the relationship between man and woman.“

INGEBORG BACHMANN is primarily a film about how the traditional understanding of roles can kill love and art. Max Frisch comes off badly from the start, and it doesn’t become quite clear why Bachmann fell so deeply in love for this Swiss man 15 years her senior and how the break up four years later resulted in a nervous breakdown and hospitalizations. Did Frisch’s old-fashioned manner give her a kind of security?

And the trip to the desert? Is metaphorical, but also concrete. In the background story, Bachmann travels to Morocco with Adolf Opel, another young lover, while the story of her relationship to Max Frisch is told in flashbacks. The desert is a kind of neutral point from which Bachmann can start again; the journey is a cleansing gesture, an arrival and a departure.

Hendrike Bake

Translation: Elinor Lewy