The mother in this film is so awful she couldn’t be anything but real

When a movie starts with a declaration that it is based on a true story, Lars Eidinger usually feels a rising irritation. “OK, why are they telling me that?” he asks himself. “What difference does it make?”

But in Matthias Glasner’s Dying, where Eidinger plays a character whose tormented relationship with his family is based word-for-word on the director’s real life, he saw the point. “Because, otherwise, you would not believe it. I couldn’t believe there was a relationship between a mother and son where they just shook hands. Where she had never hugged him. But it’s true – and maybe that’s good to know.”

Eidinger brings the full weight of his experience as a Shakespearean actor to his role as Tom, a conductor working with a youth orchestra to present the first performance of a piece – also called Dying – by his composer friend Bernard. Depressive, abusive Bernard (Robert Gwisdek) simmers perpetually on the brink of suicide, which makes him a difficult collaborator, but there is an unshakeable bond between them.

Lars Eidinger’s character in Dying has a tormented relationship with his family.

Tom is conscious, however, of falling short in other relationships – with his father, who is dying slowly of Parkinson’s, with his intermittent girlfriend, with his alcoholic sister, with that dreadful mother. “I’m always nice,” Tom says at one point, but niceness can be a veneer. When his ex-girlfriend, whose baby he has taken on as a kind of stand-in father, accuses him of being cold, he doesn’t deny it. It’s true. Only music seems to move him.

Glasner began writing this treatment of his own life after his parents died. His partner had recently given birth to their first child. “I was in a state of crisis because I wasn’t able to deal with all of that,” he says. “I had no sleep, with the child also not sleeping. I needed a space for myself – and that space for me is writing.” He would take the baby to a cafe, knowing he had three hours at most. “So I was writing by instinct, trying to bring my parents back, in a way, because I had had no chance to connect with them in life.”

It sounds morbid, intense and forbiddingly Germanic; at three hours, Dying is certainly long. It is also often surprisingly funny. For Tom, everything seems to be happening at once: his parents’ decline and death, Bernard’s implosion, his surrogate fatherhood, the career in which he mostly feels like a failure. “The world is too much,” Glasner says. “And this was also a kind of experiment, to see if I could bring this all into a kind of symphony.” So he made Tom a conductor – also, as he says, he always wanted to be a conductor himself.

Even the scene where Tom’s mother Lissy (the remarkable Corinna Harfouch) tells him truthfully that she never liked him – a scene Eidinger says they filmed unrehearsed, only once and in a single take over 24 focused minutes – is funny in its utter awfulness. “Funny because it’s awful, yes,” Glasner agrees. “At the moment I did the film, it was not really painful any more, which is why I was able to do that.” Audiences can’t help laughing at it, which he enjoys; he hears it as a laugh of recognition. There is a universality to his experience, specific though it is.

In one scene in Dying, Lissy (Corinna Harfouch) tells her son that she never liked him.

At the outset, he knew he would stop short of including his current life. He has been with his partner for 10 years; they have two children. “So it is more about somebody I was before. Before I found a home. Before that, I was totally lost. Like Tom, drifting around.” Like Bernard, he often contemplated suicide. “It was always a possibility. It’s not like I really like life that much. They tell you life is a gift. I don’t see life as a gift. Life is a burden.” His children, on the other hand, are “the greatest gift from heaven … That’s why I am a much better person than I was 10 years ago. They really made the film possible.”

However warmed he may have been by parenthood, Glasner is still known in German film circles to be a difficult man. Eidinger had some trepidation about taking on a role where he was effectively playing his director. “I was a bit afraid that, shooting with Matthias, he would be telling me the whole day long how I should be so that I remind him of himself.” More than that, he was worried about Glasner’s explosive reputation.

In fact, nothing was as he expected. “He never or rarely talked with me about anything that I was performing. Because it was all from his perspective, he was concentrating on the other characters around me,” Eidinger says. “And he turned out to be the most tender, sensual and open-minded director. I think he was, in a way, very thankful that a group of people would meet to tell his story. I could feel that every day, because we were also shooting on the original locations: the place where his father died, for example, was where we shot that scene. We shot the funerals in the woods where his parents are buried. So it was very touching. It was like someone telling you his story.”

Not everything in Dying is taken verbatim – or even as subjectively blurred memory – from real life. Glasner has had no contact with his real sister for years, so decided not to include her. “But for the family dynamic it was important there’s also a sister. So I decided to make her another side of me, actually.” Ellie (Lilith Stangenberg) is a dental nurse. She is also a prodigiously committed drunk. One of the funniest – and bleakest – moments in the movie involves her extracting a tooth with a pair of carpenter’s pliers in the back of a pub.

“I could have been like that,” Glasner says. “At times, I have been like that. I am very much into alcohol. It frees me in many ways and gives a wildness, a craziness to my life – before the kids, I have to say – that I very much like. And I wanted to say something about that. That it’s OK to drink alcohol. It is self-destructive, I know, but why not? Who is in a position to judge these things? When Ellen says, ‘I like alcohol; I like the lifestyle, even if I die sooner’, then she is allowed to do that. All these crazy things in the film are also part of life.”

Matthias Glasner with his Silver Bear for Best Screenplay for Dying.Credit: Getty Images

As a title, Dying is confronting, even a provocation. The film’s marketing people were against it, Eidinger says, because they maintained nobody would want to see a film with that name. Then the film was chosen for the Berlinale Competition (where it won the Silver Bear for best screenplay and the Guild Film Prize) and it was too late to change it.

“But I wonder what kind of society is it where you don’t want to think about death?” Eidinger says. “I mean, you should think about it – to understand what life is. This is the ambivalence of the whole movie, that it’s called Dying, but it’s about life.” Several characters die, certainly, but the subject is the way the people around them deal with it. Although, he muses, you could also see all films – and all photographs – as memento mori, pinning down moments that have already flickered, died and passed into oblivion. “So, in a way, death is the biggest theme of every movie. We just don’t want to think about it.”

Dying screens as part of the German Film Festival, Sydney May 1-21; Melbourne May 2-21; Brisbane May 7-28. http://germanfilmfestival.com.au

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