Vacation

Summer, sunshine, holiday time, a remote country house in the northern German region of Uckermarck, and a family unit which is slowly crumbling apart. VACATION by Thomas Arslan is the portrait of four generations of a family, conceived as a construct of different love stories.

Initially the country house setting appears idyllic, with a sprawling garden on the edge of a wood and a lake close by. However, a closer look reveals something lonely, forlorn, “a space isolated from the rest of the world, forcing the characters into a world of introspection” (Arslan). Journalists, photographers, musicians – they all belong to the well-educated middle class. They convene for the family gathering as if it were an experiment in which suppressed grievance and smouldering conflicts suddenly and unexpectedly rear their ugly heads. The central character is the mother Anna, who is approaching sixty and has been living in the country house for many years with her second husband Robert and teenage son Max. Anna is happy when her daughter Laura and husband Paul arrive with their two children Leyla and Aaron. The children happily explore the house and garden, but it is not long before Laura murmurs ominously, “We shouldn’t have come.” Then Laura’s sister Sophie turns up. She is a musician and seems to be satisfied with her life. However, no sooner has she arrived, a bitter love-hate sibling conflict ensues.

“VACATION deals with the attempt to accept that the family is an organism, composed of both triumphant and ill-fated love stories, which must constantly reconfirm itself,” explains director Thomas Arslan. Ill-fated love stories dominate this group portrait of four generations of a family which Arslan carefully reunites only to let it disintegrate again.

Image © Filmgalerie 451