"Ein Sommer an der Moldau" or "A Summer in the Vltava" is a German television film from 2020 and like most of these, it runs for slightly under two hours. Or I could also say "all of these" if I am referring exclusively to these "A Summer in" films because they made many there and what follows at the end of the title is then a geographical location that is usually linked to an interesting city or beautiful nature. I travelled to Prague not too long ago, so I know exactly what I am talking about in the special scenario for this movie. Here a river is mentioned which is a bit of an exception, but as maybe 50% of the film are actually set on a boat cruising over the river rather than in Prague itself or so, it does make sense to name the film like that. However, this is almost the only thing that makes sense, but if you have come across these "Ein Sommer in" films before already, then you know that these are not exactly where you can expect good writing and filmmaking quality. This one here is surely no exception. It was made by Winkenstette, Melzener and Neviandt. I will not go into detail about the bodies of work from this trio, but they do look pretty similar. Career started with short films that may still be tolerable, but quickly afterwards they moved on to television stuff that was already (almost) as bad as this film here that united them. Admittedly, after the first 45 minutes or so, I was still tempted to give this film at least two stars out of five and not just two stars out of ten, i.e. One star out of five, but it all went south very much in the second half with some really cringeworthy moments.
If we look at the cast, it is honestly pretty shocking to see Alina Levshin as the lead in this. By 2020 it was not even ten years ago that she won the Best Actress category at the German Film Awards and many other trophies and honors for her portrayal of the title character in "Kriegerin". Under a decade later, she has to act in a mess like this one here. She is also the only actress here that I am familiar with. Lore Stefanek has a very small role here, but she can be mentioned for her fairly crucial role in a highly successful international production that was shot at the same time like this film. I am talking about "Spencer". With all the negative I have to say about this film here, I still wanna give a little thumbs-up to child actress Ziva-Marie Faske who did fine with what she was given here and it was almost a lead performance, definitely a big supporting performance. Lead actor Marko Cindric I am not familiar with, but seems he has been pretty successful to this day with films and projects from his own home country. Good for him. I understand they had to get a male lead here with an Eastern European accent, even if the actor is not Czech. It is a German production altogether, but you will find some Czech names in the crew list nonetheless, which makes total sense if you look at where the movie was shot that they would hire some locals. Unfortunately, this film also once again has the problem that it does not get the beauty through at all in terms of the landscape it is about. The river mentioned in the title has so much more to offer than the film manages to succeed with in the end, which is especially ironic because there's one character telling another on one occasion to take a look around and enjoy the beautiful landscape. Oh well. Priceless in a bad way.
I definitely also want to elaborate a bit on all that I thought felt wrong with the film in the second half. I mean Levshin is surely more talented in general than she could show us here, but she is also sleepwalking her way through the movie literally it feels. Poor choice already that she accepted the role, but also disappointing how she did almost nothing with it, even if restrained is generally her approach to acting you can say. As for the second half, the best way to summarize it all is probably if I call it pseudo drama for the sake of it. The elderly male tourist on the boat finds out he has a son living in the Czech Republic, the female protagonist's boyfriend shows up out of nowhere there, some youth welfare office guy shows up randomly and we can wonder how he even knows where the male protagonist is exactly that day with his boat, but oh well. This scene then with Levshin's character impersonating a woman working for a German school and taking care of things was maybe the worst moment from the entire movie. So cringe to watch and no actress could have pulled that off. Also did not fit the character at all. I felt bad for Levshin there, but again you can say she agreed to play the role, so I should maybe worse for all those Germans being forced to pay GEZ so that films like this one can get made. An abomination on quite a few occasions. These escalations towards the end then were pretty bad too like how the male protagonist finds out that the female protagonist had been spying on him and confronts her and also then the almost expected pseudo drama when the little girl runs away. I mean it would have been somewhat tolerable then if they find her and take her home, but of course they had to get in some dangerous water action too there with the girl falling into the river. I think it also felt extremely unrealistic that the girl threw away the chain she made for her mother. Given all this nonsense, the child actress really did a solid job as I stated earlier already.
The only thing that maybe could have made this film worse would have been if Levshin's character had gotten together with the captain eventually. But I guess this was then too much for the script authors even because if we are honest, this film is once again a prime example of how men and women are treated very differently in these films here in Germany. I think it was not a Degeto production anymore, but as bad as all those. So yeah if we had a male protagonist not only not appreciating his dedicated girlfriend who wants to move in with him, but even not take her calls, and instead he would kiss a dark-haired stranger on a boat, then we in the audience were absolutely led to believe that the man is as low and unfaithful and despicable as it gets. Here with a female in the lead, it is the exact opposite and we are still supposed to like her a lot and want her to be happy on her trip to finding herself and what is really best for her. Eventually, she is united with her original man and they travel together to the Alps. I must say this photoshoot moment almost at the very end there also did not make him look very likable to me either. First time actually in the movie. How, all of a sudden, all the mothers and kids stand together for the photo was quite a joke and the brief depiction of how the male protagonist is talking to another female parent was not really any better in its implication that maybe there he will find love then. All needs to be fixed and everybody needs to be happy of course.
I talked a lot about the second half now, but there's also issues where the film was struggling in the first half. The first meeting between the two leads was a bit cringeworthy already when she steps on his ship or take the moment we see the girl interact with other girls her age and how it goes wrong there. Or take all those scenes that have us watch Levshin's character watch the girl in an attempt to find out if the girl is really working way too hard for her age. I wish those scenes when we see her filled with joy while learning and making music with her dad could have saved the film, but they did not. The Beatles moment was still tolerable, but the Ed Sheeran inclusion was just cringeworthy and on another occasion we hear a song that could have been by Lena Mayer-Landrut (judging from the voice) and it was really poor and kinda ruined the for once nice nature imagery there. The aforementioned singer ha an Eastern European background too as you can see from her last name, even if it is not about the Czech Republic I think. Same is surely true for lead actress Levshin. Her roots are even further east, but maybe it explains a bit why she was cast as the lead for this film here, even if her character is full-on German. Overall, this film changes from a weak film to an awful film in the second half and that is why I am glad it was relatively short and stayed far away from the two-hour mark luckily. It is not worth watching as a whole, but also there are many small moments that will make you cringe like the scene with the screen saved that depicts the boyfriend. In general, I say pay close enough attention or you might miss something good, but here pretty much the opposite is the case and if you blink one time too many during certain parts, you might very well miss something that is, however, absolutely worth missing because it is based on such poor writing. I highly recommend to stay far away from this movie. Definitely not recommended.
If we look at the cast, it is honestly pretty shocking to see Alina Levshin as the lead in this. By 2020 it was not even ten years ago that she won the Best Actress category at the German Film Awards and many other trophies and honors for her portrayal of the title character in "Kriegerin". Under a decade later, she has to act in a mess like this one here. She is also the only actress here that I am familiar with. Lore Stefanek has a very small role here, but she can be mentioned for her fairly crucial role in a highly successful international production that was shot at the same time like this film. I am talking about "Spencer". With all the negative I have to say about this film here, I still wanna give a little thumbs-up to child actress Ziva-Marie Faske who did fine with what she was given here and it was almost a lead performance, definitely a big supporting performance. Lead actor Marko Cindric I am not familiar with, but seems he has been pretty successful to this day with films and projects from his own home country. Good for him. I understand they had to get a male lead here with an Eastern European accent, even if the actor is not Czech. It is a German production altogether, but you will find some Czech names in the crew list nonetheless, which makes total sense if you look at where the movie was shot that they would hire some locals. Unfortunately, this film also once again has the problem that it does not get the beauty through at all in terms of the landscape it is about. The river mentioned in the title has so much more to offer than the film manages to succeed with in the end, which is especially ironic because there's one character telling another on one occasion to take a look around and enjoy the beautiful landscape. Oh well. Priceless in a bad way.
I definitely also want to elaborate a bit on all that I thought felt wrong with the film in the second half. I mean Levshin is surely more talented in general than she could show us here, but she is also sleepwalking her way through the movie literally it feels. Poor choice already that she accepted the role, but also disappointing how she did almost nothing with it, even if restrained is generally her approach to acting you can say. As for the second half, the best way to summarize it all is probably if I call it pseudo drama for the sake of it. The elderly male tourist on the boat finds out he has a son living in the Czech Republic, the female protagonist's boyfriend shows up out of nowhere there, some youth welfare office guy shows up randomly and we can wonder how he even knows where the male protagonist is exactly that day with his boat, but oh well. This scene then with Levshin's character impersonating a woman working for a German school and taking care of things was maybe the worst moment from the entire movie. So cringe to watch and no actress could have pulled that off. Also did not fit the character at all. I felt bad for Levshin there, but again you can say she agreed to play the role, so I should maybe worse for all those Germans being forced to pay GEZ so that films like this one can get made. An abomination on quite a few occasions. These escalations towards the end then were pretty bad too like how the male protagonist finds out that the female protagonist had been spying on him and confronts her and also then the almost expected pseudo drama when the little girl runs away. I mean it would have been somewhat tolerable then if they find her and take her home, but of course they had to get in some dangerous water action too there with the girl falling into the river. I think it also felt extremely unrealistic that the girl threw away the chain she made for her mother. Given all this nonsense, the child actress really did a solid job as I stated earlier already.
The only thing that maybe could have made this film worse would have been if Levshin's character had gotten together with the captain eventually. But I guess this was then too much for the script authors even because if we are honest, this film is once again a prime example of how men and women are treated very differently in these films here in Germany. I think it was not a Degeto production anymore, but as bad as all those. So yeah if we had a male protagonist not only not appreciating his dedicated girlfriend who wants to move in with him, but even not take her calls, and instead he would kiss a dark-haired stranger on a boat, then we in the audience were absolutely led to believe that the man is as low and unfaithful and despicable as it gets. Here with a female in the lead, it is the exact opposite and we are still supposed to like her a lot and want her to be happy on her trip to finding herself and what is really best for her. Eventually, she is united with her original man and they travel together to the Alps. I must say this photoshoot moment almost at the very end there also did not make him look very likable to me either. First time actually in the movie. How, all of a sudden, all the mothers and kids stand together for the photo was quite a joke and the brief depiction of how the male protagonist is talking to another female parent was not really any better in its implication that maybe there he will find love then. All needs to be fixed and everybody needs to be happy of course.
I talked a lot about the second half now, but there's also issues where the film was struggling in the first half. The first meeting between the two leads was a bit cringeworthy already when she steps on his ship or take the moment we see the girl interact with other girls her age and how it goes wrong there. Or take all those scenes that have us watch Levshin's character watch the girl in an attempt to find out if the girl is really working way too hard for her age. I wish those scenes when we see her filled with joy while learning and making music with her dad could have saved the film, but they did not. The Beatles moment was still tolerable, but the Ed Sheeran inclusion was just cringeworthy and on another occasion we hear a song that could have been by Lena Mayer-Landrut (judging from the voice) and it was really poor and kinda ruined the for once nice nature imagery there. The aforementioned singer ha an Eastern European background too as you can see from her last name, even if it is not about the Czech Republic I think. Same is surely true for lead actress Levshin. Her roots are even further east, but maybe it explains a bit why she was cast as the lead for this film here, even if her character is full-on German. Overall, this film changes from a weak film to an awful film in the second half and that is why I am glad it was relatively short and stayed far away from the two-hour mark luckily. It is not worth watching as a whole, but also there are many small moments that will make you cringe like the scene with the screen saved that depicts the boyfriend. In general, I say pay close enough attention or you might miss something good, but here pretty much the opposite is the case and if you blink one time too many during certain parts, you might very well miss something that is, however, absolutely worth missing because it is based on such poor writing. I highly recommend to stay far away from this movie. Definitely not recommended.
