Prora

The scouts

Everyone's going to see two hot teenagers falling in love and miss the actual provocation—that Riethauser uses a Nazi monument not as backdrop but as character, a third presence that makes the tenderness almost obscene. It's nasty in the best way, which means most people will hate it.

Riethauser positions this squarely in the European art-cinema tradition of using landscape as moral architecture, a lineage from Wenders through Tarkovsky, where setting becomes philosophical argument; the restraint of the editing and the refusal to sentimentalize the romance marks real formal intelligence.

The sound design—how Riethauser lets the wind and emptiness of Prora's brutalist geometry speak—does more work than any dialogue ever could, collapsing the distance between the characters' intimacy and the massive indifference of the place around them on a shoestring budget.

Reviews

Maîtrisé et pertinent, poétique et sensuel, « Prora » est une jolie surprise de la compétition européenne.