How About Adolf?

A film set over a dinner in Germany. Stephan lectures at a university. He and his wife Elisabeth are giving a dinner. The guests are set. Elisabeth's brother Thomas, his pregnant partner Anna, and a family friend, René. Thomas makes a joke. He announces the name he will give his son, and the name is Adolf. The table stops. At first it is taken for a joke. Then Thomas insists and the argument begins. From there the film runs in a single flat. The living room, the kitchen, the hall and a balcony. The argument moves off the name. First history is discussed, then who has hidden what from whom, then something that happened years ago. René has a secret. A relationship long unspoken comes out and the balance of the table is never restored. Elisabeth's share is the heaviest. She has been doing everyone's work for years, and she says so once. What the narrative is interested in is not a name but an accumulated account: its whole matter is years of resentment pouring out once a pretext is found. The structure is theatrical. Almost the whole film is in real time and the camera follows whoever is speaking. The source is a French play. The text was staged in France first, then filmed there, and this is a German remake of the same story. The German version carries the question of the name somewhere heavier. The same name was chosen in the French original, but setting it in Germany ties the argument directly to the country's own history. Christoph Maria Herbst, Florian David Fitz, Caroline Peters and Justus von Dohnányi are in the cast. Sönke Wortmann directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes single-location comedy built on dialogue. Who it is not for: anyone who has seen the French original; the structure is almost identical and comparison is unavoidable.