Larry Oliver Film Reviews

At the start of the biopic, Lou Andreas-Salomé , there is a caption: 11 May 1933. The Nazis are in a book burning mood. Psychiatry is seen as a Jewish profession, therefore all books on the subject must be destroyed and all practitioners - well, we can imagine.  The earnest (read: cash-strapped) student Ernst Pfeiffer (Matthias Lier) visits 72 year old noted psychiatrist Lou Andreas-Salomé (Nicole Heesters) whose privacy is jealously, nay, religiously guarded by her ‘housekeeper’ Mariechen (Katharina Schüttler). ‘Frau Andreas-Salomé does not see patients anymore,’ Ernst is told. He writes her a note, which Mariechen dutifully passes to Lou. ‘Well, let him in,’ she instructs. The note refers to a matter of life and death. The nervous Ernst starts talking. He has a friend who has a wife to support and is a student with a crisis of confidence. He wants to kill himself. Lou – and the rest of us – sees through him.  ‘You are married and you want to kill yourself.’ Ernst nods. Fo...

  There are those who believe that the Palme D’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival should have been given to Toni Erdmann , a two-hour-and-forty-two-minute German comedy about an unusual father-daughter relationship. As many critics will tell you, comedies don’t win major prizes as they are assumed to be frivolous – not art. There are two recent exceptions. La Vita È Bella (Life is Beautiful) (1997) winner of the 1998 Best Picture Oscar featured a father (Roberto Benigni) fighting to convince his young son (Gioergio Canterini) that they are not in a concentration camp and that the adults around them are playing an elaborate game. Michel Hazanvicius’ The Artist (2011) winner of the 2012 Best Picture Oscar was also a comedy about an over-confident silent movie star (Jean Dujardin) lost in the sound era. Let’s not also forget that Robert Altman’s M.A.S.H. won the Palme D’Or equivalent at Cannes in 1970. As these films prove, a comedy can say as much as a serious film. This is c...