User Reviews

I have a problem with this movie.

It is not bad, and I'd like to recommend it... but I don't know who should it be recommended to.

The hero of the movie Sophie is a teenage girl. A girl whose mother has died, father is in love with another woman who is divorced and has a daughter of her own. And, of course, Sophie is devoted to memory of her late mother, so she refuses to accept her future stepmother whatever she does. When her father asks her to go with them to vacancies instead of going to grandmother Sophie obeys without enthusiasm and, after a short while of making holidays unpleasant for everybody, she runs away one night planning to spend the rest of holiday at her grandmother.

So far it could be any Scandinavian kids movie, for age between 10 and 14. What subject is more common in Swedish or Norwegian movie for kids than coming-to-age story about a child from damaged family – either after death or divorce of parents, with both the kid and the remaining parent trying to find a way to collect the pieces of life and somehow go on? Usually some adventure is to be expected ("Misa mi", "Regina", "Ulvesommer", "Emma & Daniel", "Fia og klovnene"...).

But suddenly the movie turns into a kind of SF, with a American-like premise: let's make one impossible thing real, and see what will happen with the world that is otherwise normal as the one we live in. Hollywood likes it in big production for adults - "Gremlins" had the strange creature, "Eternal Sunshine..." the machine that deletes certain memories, "Big" a machine that fulfills wishes and changes the age of a boy. In Middle Europe this is a very usual plot trigger in kid's movies - "De bal", "Tajna starog tavana", "Anna – annA", "Fakiren fra Bilbao", "Hilfe, ich bin ein Junge", "Dreamgate" etc.

"Lapizlazuli" uses a premise that a meteorite could melt the frozen prehistoric boy who suddenly starts roaming Tirolian Alps. However, unlike other movies which use such an unrealistic event as a catalyst for an adventure, "Lapislazuli" keeps the rather darker tone of family drama from the first part; it even amplifies it later, and there is not a happy ending that Hollywood made us used to. This boy doesn't belong to our world the way E.T. doesn't, or Alf, or other similar heroes; but as this is not a classic American SF that has fantastic exit from the problems, sometimes even deus-ex-machina type, the destiny of prehistoric boy will be shown realistically. It seems that European kids can handle serious subjects and lack of happy-end better than American (or just American producers think it won't make money, as they do with movies for their parents as well). Maybe it is the European tradition – at least half of the stories written by the greatest writer for kids, Hans Christian Andersen, don't have happy end. (But when American directors use his stories, they change the end to satisfy their audience).

So it seems that I got the answer - this unusual, but well made movie is made for European kids, a bit older than I first thought, because they have to understand some characters' motives that are not like ones they meet in everyday life. Very good to be watched together by members of different generations though. The plot is logical once you believe its rather ridiculous (and not well presented) premise. There is no way that the camera can fail when you make a movie in Tirol, but it was obvious that the director was more interested in characters.

And if you can accept all that, then I have another answer to my original question: this is a movie for you.

"Lapislazuli - Im Auge des Bären" is a film from almost 10 years ago, which was mostly directed at younger audiences I guess. The director and writer is Wolfgang Murnberger and the original story comes from Volker Krappen. Murnberger has worked a lot with notable Austrian actor Josef Hader in much darker movies. But somehow, even this film here could be described as a little bit dark with the fate that awaits the boy at the end. Talking about notable Austrian actors, a certain Christoph Waltz (before his two Oscars) also plays in this film here. Apart from him, experts of German cinema may be familiar with the work of Lena Stolze, Hans Werner Meyer, Vadim Glowna or Gregor Bloéb. The central character, a little girl, is played by Julia Krombach. She has not acted since 2011 and may be back to "normal life". I personally found she looked a bit like Saoirse Ronan.

Anyway, the story is about a girl finding a thawed Neanderthal boy, who gets hunter right away in order to be put into a museum. Luckily, the girl has people on her side too who help her in protecting the strange kid. One of the big problems in this movie was that there were really only characters that were 100 good or 100% evil, no shades, nothing in-between these two extremes. And the suffering of the girl with the Neanderthal's fate did not really move as much as I hoped it would. Minor criticisms also go out to the title (no major lapislazuli reference in the movie) and the use of Xavier Naidoo's song in the end, which simply did not fit even if the scene they used it for was beautiful. All in all, I would say the negative outlasted the positive, so I cannot give this one a thumbs-up.