The System - Understanding Everything Means Forgiving Everything

Mike (Jacob Matschenz) is twenty and without real prospects. Everyday life in a dreary prefabricated housing estate in Rostock is determined by dubious business dealings, minor robberies or simply bored join smoking with his best buddy Dustin (Florian Renner). When Mike breaks into the house of Böhm (Bernhard Schütz), an old friend of his late father, one night, everything changes. Because instead of turning Mike in, the lobbyist takes the young man under his wing, opening the door to a world Mike never even dreamed of before. Instead of wearing a hoodie and jeans, he now wears a suit and tie, and instead of making illegal deals, he now earns really good money with real work. Böhm is increasingly becoming a kind of surrogate father, which Mike's mother Elke (Jenny Schily) doesn't like at all. She and Böhm have a secret, which Mike must not find out under any circumstances. With Dustin's help, Mike sets out to find the answers on his own - and calls on his father's old friends, who don't like it when someone pokes around in the past. But Mike knows that he first has to understand the system in order to really understand his place in life...

The System - Understanding Everything Means Forgiving Everything is a suspenseful political thriller, which despite a certain TV character (the film was made in co-production with ZDF's Kleines Fernsehspiel) and a very worn staging, especially in the first half, can also provide a certain tension in the cinema. Especially because the fact that director Marc Bauder has so far primarily made documentaries is positively noticeable in the realization of the story. Because that's where he learned how to research properly and intensively. The economic-political backgrounds surrounding the construction of the Russian gas pipeline to Western Europe, the machinations of old Stasi silos in the period after the fall of the Wall and their connections, all this Bauder has meticulously researched and skillfully built into a dramatic feature film plot.

The viewer, like main character Mike, is still completely in the dark at the beginning. For initially the film seems to be nothing more than a social study of disillusioned young people who, as children of the so-called Third Generation, are dominated by a sense of being lost between a socially uncertain future and an often unknown, hushed-up past. But gradually, as Boehm's true character is revealed, so is the true background of the story. And this, being grounded in reality, is extremely exciting.

The images, kept in rather grey tones, exert a certain fascination that greatly benefits the film's build-up of tension. Also the convincing play of the actors, above all of Jacob Matschenz (Renn, wenn Du kannst) contribute to the fact that The System - Alles verstehen heisst Alles verzeihen has become a rather unusual, multi-faceted thriller. Although the whole thing is, on balance, more TV production (which is not meant negatively), than great cinema film is, but lovers of sophisticated entertainment from German lands can certainly be recommended.

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp