By Yun-hua Chen.
We wanted to lean into this classic world of superheroes and create this contrast between the supposed superhero and the ordinaries, which is what this film is about – what is ordinary, what is special? And we try to bring these elements together in this title.”
–Sophie Linnenbaum
Premiered at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival and garnering awards including Munich Film Festival’s German Cinema New Talent Award, The Ordinaries is Sophie Linnenbaum’s graduation film from the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf. With its ambitious and witty narrative, sophisticated mise-en-scène, and refreshing concept, it displays a level of maturity that belies its debut status.
The Ordinaries plays with genre conventions in a self-conscious manner and transcends genre boundaries at the same time. Within the framework of a coming-of-age drama, it is a metafiction set in a sci-fi “film world” that is divided into three classes: main characters, supporting characters, and outtakes. The “film world” within the film is an authoritarian regime in the vein of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) and reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), where society is sharply divided into three classes; main characters are privileged with their own storylines and a luxurious and colorful lifestyle, minor character freeze in the background until “action” is called, and outcasts, devoid of colors or fragmented like jump cuts, are stuck with bad sound design without scores.
In the mornings, supporting characters form a line that stretches along the corridor of their grey Soviet-style concrete building to march to work, the rigidity of the regime and replaceability of each character emphasized by a bird’s eye view. In this stark world, Paula, the teenage protagonist, is an anomaly, straddling two distinct classes; she is the daughter of a main-character father, who was presumably killed by outcast rebels, and her mother is a supporting-character, living in a state of constant fear. Attending a school that prides itself on cultivating main characters, she struggles to tap into her emotions and produce music scores from her heart like her classmates. In order to be able to mobilize her emotions, she delves into the mysteries surrounding her father’s death, embarking on a downward spiral that leads her to discover the darkness lurking beneath the glamour of main characters, as well as the authentic emotions of oppressed outtakes forced into exile.
The Ordinaries is a blatant metaphor of class divide, discrimination, and exclusion, but also refreshingly fun. While recreating some glorious moments inspired by the golden age of film history such as those pompous musical scenes of a main-character family, Sophie Linnenbaum also uses cinematic tropes formally; the split screen that brings the two girls talking to each other over the phone into the same frame is evocative of Down to Love (2003). Other details are witty and charming, like the censoring tool that looks like a plunger and literally seals people’s mouth up and condenses the censored content into crystal balls.
Admittedly, The Ordinaries, intentionally embedded with Easter eggs for cinephiles, demands an unspoken pact with the audience and can go down the path of a rather heavy-handed political allegory. Yet it reins back in time and remains a well-acted, eye-opening, and highly imaginative film for all ages, that fantasizes a world fully in cinematic terms which is equally dystopic and revolution-ready.
Where does the idea of a metafiction, a film world inside the film world, come from?
I have made my short film about a guy that is so lonely that he fell out of the picture, “[Out of Fra]me” (2016), and that was the first time that I played with this kind of cinematic world. The emotional origin of The Ordinaries lies in the frustration with fake news, and the fact that the right-wingers always have the possibility to not only depict reality via emotionally intense stories, but to invent, fabricate and create new ones. It has always annoyed me enormously that we always leave the midfield to the right-wingers. And I pondered over it basically because I wanted to do something about this influence of narratives on our lives. There is this meta-world, the cinematic one, which is about that. When we make films, we tell stories, and we also create images. And that’s why it was the obvious thing to do, so to speak.
When I watched The Ordinaries, I kept thinking, who is the director and who is the producer in this film world?
Yes, I understand. It’s almost a religious question. That’s why I can’t say too much about it. We can ask the question, does the audience believe it or does the audience not believe it? It has something to do with religious questions.
In the film world inside The Ordinaries, we see a lot of genre elements including musical and romance. Is there space for auteurist cinema to exist there?
That’s a good question. I think anything is possible, and whatever allows an exciting shaping-out for characters would be possible, so in that sense, yes. But I would also say, the world is already leaning more towards the classic Hollywood story.
Some outtakes live in jump cuts, and some in black and white. If you were a character inside this film world, what would be your favorite film technique to embody?
I like the way that you used “film technique” to describe it as an ability. I don’t think I will be in the picture. I don’t want to be in the picture.
The sci-fi element in your film is rather rare in contemporary German cinema. What is your take on that?
I think that in general it doesn’t hurt to question a bit more what kind of stories we tell and about what our storytelling is. I don’t know if it’s a question just about the sci-fi, but maybe also a question about what kind of moods we want to have in our storytelling, and, if we want to stay dystopian in the meantime or do we dare to think utopian. That’s why I think I don’t want to dictate anything to other people because I’m just personally interested in that, interested in other settings, let’s say, in being detached from what surrounds me every day.
As a parallel to the world that you portrayed in The Ordinaries, is the model of real-life filmmaking sometimes a form of dictatorship too?
I hope not. Of course, I think film reflects our society, and the way we make films also reflects our society. Now it’s just that with all the streamers and co-production committees that are under time pressure and under capitalist considerations and stuff like that. A dictatorship? I think, it is definitely a hierarchy and in the way that we decide which stories to tell, which stories to prioritize, and who to show and how. I’m not saying dictatorship, and that’s why I’m thinking of another term. It definitely has an influence on opinions that shape society; sometimes more, sometimes less. In this respect, however, I would rather call it an unconscious process of shaping than a dictatorship, because theoretically people are still free to decide what they see and how they see it. So, definitely, not a dictatorship, more like a hierarchical-democracy.
The Ordinaries gave me some Metropolis and Brazil vibes and resonates with Lanthimos’ quirkiness, as well as 50s and 60s East Germany. Where did you draw your inspiration from?
I think these films have a lot in common because we’re talking about a system. Probably also Orwell and so, about a society that is divided into classes and the mechanisms that keep these classes apart. Of course, the film was inspired by many films because it’s a film of a film, so I would say, it is less about quoting individual films, which we do too, but it is more about trying to create an intuitive image of what the film itself tells us. That’s why there are a lot of references to the Hollywood Golden Age, because we think that a lot of intuitive images came out of it, like the kissing couple in the rain or the dancing; these are things that we all feel a certain sense of familiarity with and through which we created our images.
I generally like to play around when I’m engaged in a topic. I also think that at the playground you can maybe be freer sometimes, trying different things out, discussing things, and throwing questions into the room.”
I feel that your point of racial exclusion and social repression are wrapped underneath many layers. Do you find it more fun to discuss these issues in a slightly more light-hearted manner, or is it that in our divided world it has become very difficult to talk about these topics straight-on?
I don’t know if I find this better, but I generally like to play around when I’m engaged in a topic. I also think that at the playground you can maybe be freer sometimes, trying different things out, discussing things, and throwing questions into the room. These questions are what you are perhaps otherwise tired of or what might feel so burdened with a heaviness that you can’t even talk about. In this way, perhaps a new view can be created, that contains hope that you, if being continuously stuck in reality, could not allow yourself to have.
How do you balance between making a film for all age groups and making a film that has many more different layers to be discovered?
As we’ve always said, we’re making a kind of family film, but instead of making it for parents and kids, we’re making it for film nerds and other people. And that’s why it was important to us to always find images that are intuitively understandable and for which you don’t need education on film history. That was always the goal. Our main character is, at the same time, very young, and therefore also part of the young people around the world. She goes on a journey and discovers her world, just like we all try to discover our world, no matter what age we are. It’s not a classic coming-of-age, but rather it’s a coming-of-new-background, we can say.
I find the censorship machine that gathers censored content into small balls in your film world fascinating. If you have such a machine, what do you think the balls that you gather would look like?
I wouldn’t censor anything, to start with, but if I am to do it scientifically, I would just censor violence around wars, and exploitation, and by doing that I would change the world already. In that case, I would consider censoring something.
How does your experience in Babelsberg as a mature student after studying psychology affect your view on cinema?
Well, I would say the other way round; I studied psychology because I wanted to press myself not to do anything with art, because I wanted to study something sensible. Of course, I was interested in psychology, but during my psychology studies, I already started making short films, writing theatre pieces, and taking photographs. So, art rather caught up with me. I think this interest in people, as well as people in the system, that’s what makes studying psychology and making films so connected for me. My basic interest in people remains the same. What I brought to my psychology studies is the same kind of interest that I have when I meet people, write about them, and create characters. But also, I didn’t write alone either; I wrote the script together with Michael Fetter Nathansky.
Can you talk about your casting decisions and the reversal of stereotypical racial and gender roles?
The casting of the characters who are considered a mistake by the society in the film is important. The casting of Henning Peker for the role Hilde took longer, but it was clear to us that we wanted someone who displays a roughness, but at the same time, as I always said, is a street dog; I was looking for someone who had been beaten enough to fight back, but still has a softness in him towards the humankind. For me, that character was simply Henning Picker.
Also, we’re talking about different issues of exclusion, of course, but we didn’t want to just reproduce what our society does and carry on with it. So, for us it’s about talking about these issues without following the mechanism, without reproducing certain things that we are experiencing.
The music is so important in this film because the main task of the protagonist is expression through a music score. What were your considerations when deciding on the use of music?
Our composer Fabian Zeidler loves the film. He’s also at our university and has actually just started studying. We clicked right away. It was super nice to work with him and to bring things together on the right path. I think he has done a beautiful job. There is a lot of music in the film, and at the same time I also told him from the beginning, Fabian, we need a hit. He was like, Oh God. But yes, it was really wonderful, and it was also a great pleasure to work with the actors later on to prepare the musical, and so on.
The teamwork seems rather smooth and harmonious in this film….
I love the team, every single one of them, so, yes. And, most of the team was there relatively early on already. I think you can notice that in this film, at every department, be it scenography or sound design, in front of the camera or behind the camera, everyone wanted to tell this story. They didn’t just do it because they happened to be in this job. They worked on it with passion and for exactly the same vision. I’m incredibly grateful for that.
Because we are all “the ordinaries”…
Definitely.
Why did you choose the film title “The Ordinaries”?
We decided to have the title in English because we wanted to lean into this classic world of superheroes and create this contrast between the supposed superhero and the ordinaries, which is what this film is about – what is ordinary, what is special? And we try to bring these elements together in this title.
What is your next project?
We’ll see. We are working on a series now, like how everyone answered this question probably. For my next project, I would like to work with the same producers again. At the moment, we are just heading towards the cinema release of The Ordinaries and will carry on with our festival tour, so that means that I am looking forward to being able to sitting down and writing again.
Yun-hua Chen is an independent film scholar. Her work has been published in Film International, Journal of Chinese Cinema, and Directory of World Cinema. Her monograph on mosaic space and mosaic auteurs was published by Neofelis Verlag, and she has contributed to the edited volume Greek Film Noir (Edinburgh University Press, 2022).