The Final Shot
2009, fiction, Rowohlt Berlin
A couple is spending the final weeks of the year 2000 in a penguin colony in Patagonia. They actually came to shoot a documentary film, but here at the end of the world, it seems that the grand finale of their marriage is approaching: the marriage of Maria and Johan.
When they meet in the early 1980s, Maria—young, naïve, and distressingly wealthy due to an inheritance—is trying to free herself from the onus of money via filmmaking. She fails: Instead of the destruction of capital that she expected, the first film she is involved with brings her success and even more money in the form of filmmaking grants.
Charismatic Johan, who already enjoys stature in the industry, has just suffered a bitter setback. Were there ever greater polar opposites? Yet it seems that they complement each other in a disastrous way…
Pia Frankenberg tells the story of turbulent film shoots, absurd family celebrations, and of two bullheaded protagonists trying to transform German cinema. It’s a breakneck trip through the Helmut Kohl era and the bottomless depths of a relationship as symbiotic as it is self-destructive—tragicomic and full of sympathetic irony.
Reviews
“Frankenberg celebrates her much-vaunted ‘cinema of lightness’ using a language imbued with self-depreciating, playful lightness. Loosely edited scenes of a marriage between Berlin’s Paris Bar and the bohemianism of the Berlinale Film Festival interlock like puzzle pieces to form an attitude toward life in which ‘zeitgeist’ wasn’t yet a dirty word. And in stark contrast to her case against the narrative of tradition film plots, she succeeds in creating a conventional, thoroughly enjoyable love story full of wonderfully comic moments of slapstick …
”Berliner Zeitung
“… But the author chronicles not only the downfall of a marriage, but also the atmosphere of the 1980s German film scene. With great attention to detail and plenty of irony, she describes the protagonists and their discussions, their eternally identical leather jackets and bold ideas. The Final Shot is written in a lively and clever style, and provides deep insights into the film scene of the 1980s. Connoisseurs and especially insiders to the scene will enjoy Frankenberg’s affectionate and ironic descriptions. Others will also read it with pleasure.
”NDR Kultur
“The novel’s storyline uses a montage of flashbacks to recount the two decades the couple has spent together, right back to the moment they first met on a film set in the early 1980s. The couple’s heyday coincided with the best, most utopian and most turbulent period of German auteur cinema. Very plausible and without any narrative convolutions, Pia Frankenberg intertwines the melancholic loss of hope within a private narrative with the loss of energy in an era of German cinematic history …
”Deutschlandradio Kultur