It was supposed to be a pop art world satire with loud criticism of the patriarchy and the cultural scene. But Elena Wolff’s feature film “Asche”, which premiered on Saturday evening at the Diagonale in Graz, leaves you a bit perplexed with episodic stories from the lives of young Linz artists. At the end, critical tones are replaced by loud, sometimes difficult to understand vampire-style twists.
It is a completely artificial world into which director and leading actress Wolff leads her audience: the Linz art chic, a bubble of drug excesses and meaningless talk regarding art. In the middle of it all are three lovers and an outsider whose stories tell of toxic masculinity, muses, falling relationships and punishable sexual preferences. However, the background mostly remains in the shadows and the plot increasingly slides into absurdity.
But rays of hope keep flickering up, reminiscent of Wolff’s first film “Para:dies” from 2022, which also premiered on the Diagonale. Wolff’s dialogues are characterized by clever, almost iconic sentences. So outsider Jakob (actor Nils Svenja Thomas convinced as a supposed psychopath) tells his crush, the beautiful “Lulu”, played by Wolff, what is left for him in life: he is only allowed to “pick from the sidewalk what the Brad Pitts drop “. Or when the completely overrated art photographer Simeon (wonderfully portrayed as an asshole by Thomas Schubert) comes to the conclusion: “It’s far more bearable to be bad if you’re the only one who knows it.”
But in the next moment, profound words are overshadowed by brutal intoxication. It’s difficult to hold on to the film throughout. Especially at the end, when the life and love stories of the protagonists take their turns, the possibilities of identification or at least comprehensibility slip away – keyword necrophilia.
After the premiere of the independent film, Wolff revealed that “Asche” was originally a play that she wrote when she was 23. “You can tell to some extent,” she said. Their basic idea was that all characters were human and also interchangeable. The title comes from the plan that everything should burn down in the end, but “there wasn’t enough money for that,” said Wolff. There was applause for the soundtrack, which draped itself over the scenes like a well-fitting coat – including Apollo Sissi with “Cocaine”.
