10/08/2023 - Katharina Lüdin’s first feature examines the dangerous yet reassuring grey zone separating love from hate and affection from contempt

A director, author, producer and actress of theatre and film, Katharina Lüdin thrives on multidisciplinarity. Whether from theatre stages or dark rooms, the young Swiss director and former student of HFBK in Hamburg and UdK in Berlin sees art as a means for expressing other realities, fleeting states of mind which suddenly become tangible. In her first feature film Of Living Without Illusion [+see also:
trailer
film profile], a movie selected for the Locarno Film Festival’s Cineasti del Presente competition, loving relationships leading to emotional dependency are placed under the microscope. With poetry and heart-breaking realism, Katharina Lüdin successfully captures the desperate search for love embarked on by a lost being who no longer believes they deserve anything good.

The heat is stifling and the city feels like a furnace. On the outskirts, protected by the walls of a house which acts as the nerve centre for a seemingly everyday family, we find Merit, Eva, David, Lionel, Rose and Clovis. But what’s hiding behind this apparent monotony? Without directly revealing the underlying tensions at play, Katharina Lüdin reveals from the outset that something’s not quite right, and that behind the couple composed of Merit and Eva, believed to be solid by family members, lurk unspeakable truths. The characters’ conversations seem one-sided, words carried by the wind which never join together, a kind of litany of the everyday dominated by one-sided emotions. Merit (the incredibile Jenny Schily) doesn’t know what to do, trapped in a relationship she both desires and disdains, a relationship which turns her into a “monster” who’s happy to vent her frustrations against the person who desires her more than anything else in the world. Eva, meanwhile (a poignant Anna Bolk), who’s obsessed with a love which is no longer requited and which she wears like a battle dress, desperately tries to make herself invisible so that she can stay by the side of the person she fears and adores unconditionally.

By way of a series of sequence shots both poetic and aesthetically powerful, Katharina Lüdin helps us enter into the daily lives of a family forced to face up to their own inner demons. A lynchpin around whom all the characters gravitate, Merit slowly turns into a torturer, a despot whose sudden mood swings impact the lives of everyone around her. Huddling in the dark recesses of a daily life marked by fear and violence, Eva accepts her fate with apathy. What’s stopping her from leaving? How can she accept the continual humiliations inflicted on her by a partner who’s supposed to love and respect her?

Rather than judging (and we thank her for this), the director demonstrates that violence, a social construct, isn’t the exclusive domain of so-called “men”. In Of Living Without Illusion, Katharina Lüdin deconstructs the heteropatriarchal stereotype which sees “women” as lacking in any violent reflexes. Despite the perverse nature of a relationship based on control and submission, Merit and Eva live independently, they love one another and destroy one another without needing support or validation from a male figure. The emotions they feel are intense and the relationship they’re maintaining is decidedly toxic, but they and they alone are the ones who chose it.

Of Living Without Illusion also pays intense tribute to normally invisible characters: middle-aged women living independently, outside of the dictates of a heteropatriarchal society which rather they were docile, mothers or devoted partners, eternally compliant and never - unlike Merit and Eva - animated by feelings which burn like fire.

Of Living Without Illusion was produced by Was bleibt Film in co-production with Contrast Film Zürich GmbH, Silva Film and Katharina Lüdin Filmproduktion.

(Translated from Italian)