52 Films by Women Vol 3. 21. LOMO – THE LANGUAGE OF MANY OTHERS (Director: Julia Langhof)
The young German writer-director
Julia Langhof wanted to make a film about a passive central character. She
partially succeeds in her feature debut, LOMO – The Language of Many Others,
about a seventeen-year-old student who conducts his life virtually, but whose
online activity has potentially devastating consequences for his family.
Karl (Jonas Dassler) attends high school with no idea what
he wants to do next. He devotes his life to his blog, ‘LOMO – The Language of
Many Others’, which has followers worldwide. His parents disapprove, especially
when it is their lives that he is blogging about. He becomes the focus of
attention of politician’s daughter, Doro (Lucie Hollman), who has a testing
relationship with her mother – Doro is a boundary pusher. When she breaks off
their relationship, Karl puts a sex tape of the two of them online. Then all
hell breaks loose. Karl’s father (Peter Jordan) is an architect whose firm
depends on the patronage of the politician; she can make sure that his firm
doesn’t win a contract, putting his staff out of work. Then Karl’s public have
a say on what happens next. After Karl’s computer is destroyed, a young boy
turns up at his door and gives him a phone.
The high-stakes second half of the movie is fairly terrific.
In one striking sequence, Karl closes his eyes and asks his viewing audience to
guide him. He ends up at a stranger’s house and sits down to eat with them in
the garden. They assume he is somehow known to them but are too polite to ask.
The film explores the extent to which people can intervene
in the lives of others online, with real world consequences, even though their
intervention can seem like a game. People can be crowd-funded to do the things
that others wouldn’t contemplate. Individuals can be the vessels of others.
Langhof doesn’t ask how Karl got there. We sense that young
people who become the centre of attention online can get drunk on it; they
enjoy meeting a perceived need of the public. Like any addiction, it is
difficult to wean oneself off it. There is no substitute for physical feeling,
real contact, but even that can be treated lightly.
The other danger Langhof foregrounds is the extent to which non-bloggers
are vulnerable. People have camera phones and are prepared to use them. The
internet makes the private public and even cease and desist orders cannot stop
content being disseminated and stored.
LOMO – The Language of Many Others is a film that disapproves
of the internet. It argues, I think, for ethical blogging, for sharing videos
only with the consent of their subject and for upholding the right to be
ignored. It also argues for limiting young people’s access to social media. If
you needed a state national insurance number and passport number to log on, you
would take your internet activity more seriously. Social media can turn young
people into false messiahs, not because they have any special insight, but
through the extent to which they make their lives public. When Karl wants his
audience to ignore his blog, he posts a recording of a receding view of a
house, the camera retreating further and further away until they view is from
space; Google Maps have a lot to answer for. The mistake Karl makes is to
re-engage and to reveal his identity, virtually speaking.
There is, as Karl discovers, a certain pleasure in being a
human avatar, subject to viewers’ commands. It is the online equivalent of
crowd-surfing, of letting others propel you across a space, giving you a chance
to experience exhilaration that your enablers cannot truly share. At a certain
point though, you have to come back to Earth.
Karl is almost likeable when he helps his father with a
speech, Vati struggling to recall the words he has chosen. ‘You have to tell a
story,’ he explains. Later when he is quizzed about his social media activity,
Karl throws his father’s speech back in his face.
Do young people want to see a film in which they are the
problem? That will be the test when LOMO is released widely in Germany
on 12 July 2018. Karl’s activity takes him down a dark path, to the extent that
he takes a dangerous walk across a busy road.
Reviewed at Febiofest, Cinestar Andel, Prague, Saturday 17 March 2018,
19:00 screening
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