The Bloom of Yesterday

Toto researches the Holocaust and his life is coming apart. Things are bad at home and worse at the institute, where a major congress is being prepared and its star speaker wants to withdraw. On top of that he is assigned an assistant he did not want: Zazie. She is French, Jewish, and has no patience at all for Germans. Their family histories turn out to run into each other; Toto's grandfather was on the Nazi side in the war, and Zazie's family were among those killed in it. The film puts these two together and dares to build a comedy on it. Chris Kraus directs the German film; a hundred and twenty-four minutes, with Lars Eidinger as Toto and Adèle Haenel as Zazie. Kraus runs the romantic comedy shape while making the question of whether such a comedy is permissible part of the film itself.