The Elementary Particles

Two half brothers were born to the same mother and grew up apart. She joined a communal life in the sixties and left them both. Michael is a molecular biologist; he works in a laboratory, has little contact with people and feels almost nothing. Bruno teaches at a school; he is married, unhappy and always looking for something. Both are in their forties. Michael meets his old neighbour Annabelle again; Bruno meets Christiane at a holiday camp. The two relationships run at once. Oskar Roehler directs. Christian Ulmen plays Michael and Moritz Bleibtreu plays Bruno; Martina Gedeck and Franka Potente are in the cast. The source is Michel Houellebecq's novel. The book caused great argument in France when it appeared and became the writer's most discussed work. The film changes the novel's ending and its science fiction frame; the narrative rests largely on the two brothers' relationships. The matter it works at is what the idea of freedom of the sixties left its children, and the film takes that up directly. Moritz Bleibtreu won an acting award at the Berlin Film Festival for the part. The register is cold and the humour bitter; the narrative does not pity its characters. Its limit is adaptation; the intellectual side of the novel is largely removed and the narrative reduced to relationships. Who it is for: viewers who like literary adaptation and German drama. Who it is not for: some scenes are explicit, the characters unpleasant, and the narrative bleak.