"Ausgerechnet Sibirien" is a German 100-minute movie from 2012, so it had its 5th anniversary last year. The director here is Ralf Huettner, a pretty experienced German filmmaker and he came up with this one shortly after the highly successful "Vincent will Meer". But back to this one here. huettner is also one of the people in charge of adapting the Ebmeyer novel into a screenplay here. I have not read said novel, so cannot comment on parallels and differences between base material and the movie. First cast is strangely enough katja Riemann here, maybe because of the well-known name, but she is really almost inexistent in this film, plays the central character's ex-wife and she can only be seen very early on and that's it. But Joachim Król is in virtually every scene from start to finish. This is his story, his movie and one of the career-defining films for him without a doubt. He was probably a bigger star years, if not decades, earlier than now or even in 2012, but yeah he proves here on several occasions that he is still lead actor material. But it is also a somewhat thankful role for an actor. It's really difficult to mess things up and it had a lot to offer, most of which Król delivers okay while never reaching true greatness. This could also have to do with the script I must say. Neither the romance part nor the friendship with the younger man truly managed to make an emotional impact I must say and as a consequence the protagonist's massive character transformation feels occasionally a bit abrupt in my opinion and also never as touching as I hoped it would be. There is some some sense of sterile, some bleakness to Król in almost everything he does and as well as this may work early on when he plays a guy who is the epitome of a boring "Spießbürger" as we say here in Germany, as much does it backfire whn there is a sense of free spirit introduced where I am not sure if Król is the right one to portray it. But it's not like he is bad or anything either luckily and the character sure suits him looking at similar roles he has had earlier in his career. Completely aside from him and the story, here and there you get to see a little bit of Siberian landscape beauty, but I must say it was not enough probably for clearly over 90 minutes. What else, oh yeah, I inevitably had to think of Doris Dörrie's really good film "Erleuchtung garantiert" / "Enlightment guaranteed" with Wöhler and Ochsenknecht and I felt like seeing some parallels especially between Król's and Wöhler's character, even if it's just one protagonist here and not two. Finally a note on the ending, it felt a bit rushed to me, so it also did not elevate a lot of the mediocre material before that unfortunately, which maybe could have urged me to give this a higher rating. But yeah there was filler material before that and the two key storylines I mentioned earlier already (romance, friendship) feel really not elaborated on properly to deliver this kind of closure they went for here eventually. So all in all, not one of Germany's better films from 2012, watch something else instead.
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