Year of the Dragon - DVD

Film: Professionally, things have never been better for Thomas Eichner (Klaus J. Behrendt). But privately, happiness has been away from his family for some time. His wife Maren (Karoline Eichhorn) is ill with cancer and hardly that there was hope that the cancer is defeated, new metastases are detected in her. Thomas wants to be there for his wife, but realizes that he is becoming more and more emotionally distant from her. When he meets the prostitute Huong (Nina Liu) on a business trip in Saigon, feelings arise in him that he has not felt towards Maren for a long time. But he tries to suppress these feelings when he returns to Germany. Now he wants to take care of Maren completely. But the memory of Huong won't let him go. When he has to travel to Saigon once again, he seeks out the young woman once more and an intense love affair develops between the two - with dramatic consequences...

Year of the Dragon seems at first glance to be a mere string of clichés. The beleaguered businessman, estranged from his wife and son, slips into a mid-life crisis and falls for a prostitute in Vietnam who, or so it seems, is not averse to the Western man's money. The cuckolded wife, the frustrated son, these are all elements you've somehow seen countless times before. And yet director Torsten C. Fischer has managed to blend all these familiar and sometimes very worn elements into an engaging whole.

He succeeds not only through the fine acting of his visibly eager actors, but primarily through the footage he and his team captured in Saigon. The scenes, some of which are filmed surreptitiously, showing normal life on the streets of the city are just as effective as the decision to forgo helpful subtitles for some sequences. In this way, the director succeeds very well in making the feeling of strangeness that Thomas goes through in the foreign culture palpable. This gives the story a very special charm that raises this ambitious TV production above the level of comparable TV dramas.

Some of the dialogue does seem very flat and some plot twists are a bit thick. But the atmosphere Fischer builds, especially through the scenes in Saigon, easily consoles over some of these weaknesses. So, all in all, Year of the Dragon is a very soulful TV drama that can be warmly recommended to lovers of more sophisticated German TV productions. Worth seeing!

On the DVD, the film is available in a director's cut that is a few minutes longer than the TV broadcast.

Picture + Sound: The technical realization of the film is on a decent TV level. The image is clean and has good overall sharpness and atmospheric coloring, especially in the brighter moments. In the darker scenes, however, minor weaknesses such as slight image noise or deficiencies in detail representation can be discerned. Stereo sound is decent, but largely unspectacular. The dialogues sound powerful, however, the whole thing always remains very front-heavy and little dynamic.

Extras: Unfortunately, there is no bonus material.

Conclusion: Year of the Dragon is a well-acted TV drama that tells its inherently very sad story wrapped in beautiful images. It's engaging at times, but unfortunately doesn't entirely avoid the usual clichés. As a result, the whole thing increasingly loses its power, which even the dramatic finale can't build up anymore. Friends of German TV productions that offer drama, romance and good actors will definitely get their money's worth. And for such viewers then also applies: Recommendable!

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp