Mort-31
Only a few hours before I saw Fritz Lehner's newest work, the epic and impressive `Jedermanns Fest', the Austrian television showed an earlier Lehner film, `Schöne Tage' on the occasion of Franz Innerhofer's suicide. Innerhofer, the author of the book this movie is based upon, had just killed himself at the age of 58.I had read the book and I knew it was highly autobiographical, so I was not too surprised about a man like him committing suicide. The story of a young boy being treated badly at a 1950s farm, was extremely shattering. Unfortunately (though understandably), Innerhofer told it in such an aggressive way that I got aggressive too when I read it and thought, he had better told it to his psychotherapist rather than to me. However, I was surprised by the movie, which was much, much better than the book. It is long (two and a half hours) and it takes its time to describe rural life in Southern Austria at the respective time. Characters are given a chance to develop, the movie doesn't show any unnecessary cruelty, still it doesn't play down the book's shocking topic. All the actors are amateurs, or more precisely: regionals of the area where the film is set (I think it is Carinthia).I also had the chance to compare this film to `Jedermanns Fest'. Lehner seems to like working with an amateur cast and he doesn't seem to care a lot about the audience realizing this. The lack of talent in the models in `Jedermanns Fest' is rather annoying, but here, where reticent farmers are portrayed, it doesn't matter at all. A major difference between the movies is, that although `Schöne Tage' is set in the picturesque Southern Austrian landscape, Lehner is much less anxious to capture the landscape than in `Jedermanns Fest', where one might not expect images of this kind.This is one of a handful of cases, where the film version surpasses the original book by far.
