comic – The Framing Device

Policewoman Andrea (Birgit Minichmayr) wants a divorce. Her ex-husband Andi (Thomas Stipsits) is the life and soul of any (birthday) party but they want different things. He wants her back, to continue drinking excessively, embarrassing her in public and she wants a divor… well, you get the picture. A new job awaits her in the capital St Pölten, she’ll be a Detective Inspector interacting with “real criminals” and not wasting time on the side of the road catching speeding violators.

After celebrating partner Georg’s (Thomas Schubert) birthday in which Andi makes yet another desperate attempt at getting her back, this time imploring her to arrest him, revving his car engine while intoxicated. She confiscates his car keys and makes him walk home. Later, while she’s driving home her father calls and she takes her eyes off the road for a second and accidentally mows down Andi. She tries to save him and when it is futile, she gets back in her vehicle and drives off. Only when Georg hammers on the door to tell her that her estranged husband is dead at the wheel of RE teacher and ex-boozer – now an imbiber of black tea and milk only – Franz Leitner (Josef Hader) does Andrea realise that she may just get away with it.

Andrea Gets a Divorce is a quietly charming little film, an Austrian dramedy which actually has much to say beyond its humour (though not quite the biting satire we have come to expect from Austria) and dose of melancholy. Whether commenting on the effects of alcohol – Austria changed its alcohol laws in 2019 – without being judge and jury, casual racism within a rural town, or the sly inherent sexist commentary a woman faces, and a police officer at that. Andrea’s weight, marital status, biological clock are all up for discussion, at one point she is even likened to an SS officer. She’s a single woman bearing the burden of responsibility for everything it seems and not merely straddling her new role as a law-breaker. Finding balance and prioritising themselves is not always the natural way of things for a woman and this film depicts the push, pull and self-doubt beautifully. Or as remarked early on, “the women are moving away and the men are getting weirder.”

Minichmayr is excellent as the closed-off lead, she who rarely smiles while struggling with her guilt and sense of justice. Writer-director Hader follows up his 2017 debut Wild Mouse with this and is delightful in support as forgetful Franz whose ill-gotten culpability threatens to ruin him in a haze of late-night disco dancing and G&Ts. While it could have been easy to write off these people as simpletons from a small town, Hader avoids leaning into clichéd stereotypes. There is some complexity and layering to these characters who are settled in their mundane provincial little lives, somewhat fearful of change which tends to be true of most quaint little places.

All roads are paved with good intentions, or just the one in and out of town which is shot perfectly and bookends a sweet film. Andrea Gets a Divorce is a wonderfully wry and sensitive piece of storytelling about life and friendship, forgiveness and guilt surrounding a divorce and bereavement at losing a whole person or that sense of self. It is woven together with an amusing if deadpan sense of humour, often callous but rarely alienating. The joke punchline being the very film title itself.

My Friend Dahmer (Dir. Marc Meyer, 2017)

There’s usually always one. The slightly awkward loner in school; the social outcast whose interests include tennis, band practice, binge-drinking and, you know, dissolving dead animal carcasses in acid. For Revere High in Ohio, during the seventies, that kid was Jeff Dahmer (Ross Lynch).

Based on fellow classmate, John ‘Derf’ Backderf’s bestselling graphic novel, My Friend Dahmer takes place during a very specific timeframe, the graduating year of 1977-78. The isolated teenage Dahmer makes friends (well, almost) with Derf (Alex Wolff), Neil (Tommy Nelson) and Mike (Harrison Holzer) as they look forward to college and a life beyond the oppressive institution that is high school. For Dahmer, it was the year his warring parents (played respectively by Anne Heche and Dallas Roberts) finally divorced and abandoned him just prior to his first (human) kill.

Backderf’s comic – the original source material for Director Marc Meyer’s script – is a stark portrait, weirdly grotesque with a sweet and sinister edge. It depicts high school as a cruel and relatable experience, that yearning to fit in, the shelter it provides from the harsher outside world, and that’s just for every other kid who doesn’t grow up to be a killer. There’s a tenderness in Derf’s pages as he recounts his life as a teenager looking in on the kid that doesn’t belong. Sadly, by changing the narrative point-of-view, the film loses that originality and becomes yet another character study depicting the early years of a serial killer. The coming-of-age aspect and the odd pacing means, as a whole, it never quite coalesces.

That said, there are nice touches, little story kernels which hint at the future: the gifting of the dumbbells, the choice of roommate on the class trip, even his mother – not afforded much screentime but played brilliantly by Heche – declaring at the dinner table that they now “eat their mistakes”. The mise-en-scène tends to consist of yellows, greens, browns and blues and Dahmer’s costumes co-ordinate with the surroundings. He blends into the background, hiding in plain sight, repressing his hinted-at sexuality and more macabre predilections until that fateful day he chose to pick up Steven Hicks.

Ross Lynch’s performance is chilling – he has the vacant stare and distinctive gait down, second only to Jeremy Renner’s portrayal in the 2003 biopic Dahmer. Somewhat apt given that this film could act as a pre-cursor to that one. The first half of the serial killer’s life as it were. Given his tumultuous family life, it is easy to pity the strange and lonely boy depicted in this film, however, any sympathy is limited. Feigning meltdowns, ridiculing and mimicking palsy, reenacting his mother’s manic episodes AKA ‘spaz attacks’ as entertainment reveals the darker side of Jeff’s nature even before the murders, necrophilia and cannibalism.

My Friend Dahmer is a somewhat unremarkable and slight study of a psychopath in the suburban seventies. It lacks the nuance and honesty of the source material but manages to humanise the human before he became a monster and begs the question: where were all the adults?