A Heavy Heart is a film about the almosts, or to be more precise, the almost almosts. It takes place somewhere in Germany in a town/city full of bull headed men that work out endlessly yet look more out of work than worked out. It’s a place full of interiors where the green painted walls look gone off, expired, thrown up on. It’s a place full of punching bags, both of the boxing sort and the human. It’s a place where the characters are beat up and full up, weighed down by sand and heavy junk, that kind that shouldn’t be confused for anything valuable or interesting — it’s junk with a capital dump (I believe the American term is landfill, but that doesn’t quite have the same ding to it).
The film’s biggest problem is that it seems to give off the idea that the story it supposes to tell is something of the original kind. Yet the drama is never anything but a cliché. Yes, the main character has a cut-off daughter who won’t talk to him — well, rather, she will talk to him, she just refuses to communicate with him. The misery the film exhales — and this film is a heavy smoker — is misery for the sake of misery.
The character we look at for 100-plus minutes is Herbert (Peter Kurth) a former East German boxing champ now scrounging around as a debt collector/bouncer/trainer trying to scrape out a living. He has a Route 66 eagle tattooed on his chest and the Statue of Liberty inked on his arm. He dreams of going to Santa Monica (he obviously has no concept of jammed traffic) yet we know he’ll never make it. The illness in question is ALS — early on we see him fall in the shower as his muscles spasm. As the spasms worsen and the film progresses he can ignore the pains no longer, then he’s diagnosed with the debilitating disease.
Despite the illness taking its toll, the film somehow becomes liberated and shockingly even funny at one point. Herbert, his ability to speak gone, communicating through a computer complains that he looks like death — “but in technicolor,” a friend replies. The film’s most moving sequence occurs just after Herbert’s diagnosis when he stumbles into an internet café despite the fact that he has no clue how to work any of the computers. An employee informs him to Google the information he’s after. “What’s koogle?,” Herbert replies. He then writes “ALS” on a piece of paper and asks for help to search for information on these letters. We almost need not see any more, but of course we do.
Director Thomas Stuber, who makes his feature-length debut here, sadly never makes us care about the drama. As a clichéd exercise in misery, this is more heavy than heart.
A Heavy Heart is screening at TIFF. See the trailer above and our coverage below.
