Chucks (Gerhard Ertl & Sabine Hiebler, 2015) : Austria

Reviewed by Nathan Pécout. Viewed at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, at the Metro 4 Theatre.

Chucks is an Austrian film by Sabine Hiebler and Gerhard Ertl, a duo that frequently collaborated in the past. With this film, they tell a story that deals with desillusion and the acceptance of death.

Mae is a dropout, living on the fringe of society in Vienna. She wanders with her group of friends in this grey urban environment, the only colors emerging from this monotony being her graffitis and her flaming red hair. Her reject of convential lifestyles seems to come from the loss of her brother that ripped her family apart when she was just a child. Her parents are divorced, we don’t see her father but her mom appears as lost as her daughter, living a boring life in her small flat. Mae still suffers from her brother’s passing, she often dreams about him in the hospital. These visions are brutally interrupted when she wakes up with a start in the middle of the night. The impact and the suddenness of her awakenings is expressed in the film by brutal cuts from Mae’s dreams to her violently sitting up in her bed.

Despite the still open wounds of her brother’s death, Mae is going to engage herself on more time in a similar process. After being arrested by the police, she is assigned to an AIDS care center as a community service obligation. There, she will meet Paul, a young man who is HIV-positive and has hepatitis. His passion for books will seduce Mae and, despite the unavoidable perspective of Paul’s death, she will fall in love with him. From this point, Paul’s situation will echo with Mae’s brother Sebastian’s story : Mae knew his brother wouldn’t survive for a long time, and she knows Paul won’t live very long either. One detail that emphasizes on this analogy is the graphic match cut between the empty hall where Mae used to wait for her dad after her brother passed away and Paul’s empty apartment : here, the light is put on the extreme similarity between the two situations. But as she did for Sebastian, she will stay by Paul’s side until the very last moments.

Mae kept from her brother his pairs of shoes, and she starts collecting small things that have a link with Paul (some cut nails, a used condom). This is her way to not forget the gone person. But at the end of the film, her adventure with Paul will make her realize that she has to let go, to accept death as it is not possible to change anything about it. The last scene is powerful in terms of symbolism to illustrate this aspect of the film.

With Chucks, Hiebler and Ertl offer a film about a theme that is more common that we can imagine. The result is ,despite the unusual aspects of the characters, a story touching and comforting which is not hard to identify with.