Bella Figura is a play where the stage direction "flottement" (a suspension, indeterminacy, or oscillation) occurs frequently, indicating a moment of silence when the characters and audience are left in ambiguous tension. The playwright Yasmina Reza wrote Bella Figura specifically for the Schaubühne director Thomas Ostermeier, and I imagine that she included these floating silences with him in mind.
A young couple moves to a gated community (named Sechzehneichen), where soon the creative wife (a photographer) gets bored and the husband joins a secret mens' club. All the other wives seem strangely conservative and shallow. Basically a thinly veiled take on the Stepford Wives, just without any bit of humor or atmosphere, but instead filled with the sterile, unflinching and dry seriousness that makes watching a lot of our German films such a drag and a miserable experience.
Life gets on Erol Ozak's nerves. The enforcement officer is supposed to collect something from people who have nothing. And suddenly there's a bag of money, a dead person, then the money is gone again and the melancholy man from the tax office has a bag of problems instead. A bit of genre coolness, a bit of arthouse slowness, a bit of robber's tale. Sözer and Eggert in silent greatness. Unusual, brittle, worth seeing.
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