Vincent Wants to Sea

Vincent is a young man with Tourette's syndrome. His mother dies. His father is a politician in the middle of an election campaign; he places his son in a clinic. There Vincent meets two people. Marie is being treated for an eating disorder. Alexander has an obsessive disorder and cannot touch anything. One day Marie decides to run. Vincent goes with her; he will take his mother's ashes to Italy, to the sea. Alexander gets in the car too. The three set out. The father and the clinic doctor come after them. Ralf Huettner directs. Florian David Fitz wrote the screenplay and plays Vincent; Karoline Herfurth and Johannes Allmayer are in the cast. It is a German production. The film took a strong result at the German box office and won at the national film awards. The matter it treats is the difference between a diagnosis and a person; all three refuse to be defined by their conditions. Fitz worked with people living with Tourette's for the part and that preparation was pushed in the publicity. The narrative carries the distance between father and son as a second axis. The road film shape is used; the Italian sections lighten the register. The narrative criticises the order of the clinic but offers no alternative. Its limit is structure; the shape is familiar and the last section too tidy. Who it is for: viewers who like German road films and character drama. Who it is not for: it is predictable, the emotional steering high, and the resolution easy.