Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything: a sunkissed erotic drama

• Reviewed from the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival

In Emily Atef’s More Than Ever (2022), the director used sex as a way for her protagonist to rediscover bodily agency in the face of terminal illness. Her follow-up looks at the other side of this coin, exploring sexuality as a potentially demeaning, even destructive force. Its 18-year-old protagonist Maria, in a liminal space between not just childhood and adulthood but East and West Germany, experiences coming of age as a passage that’s both emotionally choppy and physically treacherous.

Adapted from the 2011 novel of the same name by Daniela Krien, the film is set in 1990 in a farming village on the border between the two Germanies, which are preparing for reunification. Maria (Marlene Burow) is directionless, spending her days smoking absent-mindedly and trailing through fields that reflect her honey-hued tresses. Her parents divorced and her mother unemployed, she is living with her boyfriend’s family when a run-in with their troubled neighbour Henner (Felix Kramer) ignites a spark of lust. Maria embarks on a rough affair that leaves her bruised, lovesick, and with more questions than answers about what to do next; as she tussles with her options, the film suggests, melancholically, that we are all doomed to choose the wrong path and must be taught a harsh lesson.

Burow is suitably inscrutable as a bronzed, dreamy adolescent who “skips school and reads all day”. The film is shot handsomely by Armin Dierolf in the bucolic Thuringian countryside; there’s initially an atmosphere of sunkissed, haptic sensuality, and the first sex scene is near-silent, save for the brush of coarse, gnarled hands over clothes and the slow menace of a zip being undone. The sudden tip into sexual violence, while consensual, is startling.

At its best, the film recalls Terence Davies’s Sunset Song (2015), evincing a profound connection to a land that battles against ideals of progress. Here, East German communism entails a life of conformity; strain between characters arises from the resentment between those wanting to remain on the farm and those enticed by the lustre of Western ideals. It’s a tension captured by the set design and cinematography: dank interiors make domesticity seem stifling, while horizons glimpsed through windows are compellingly golden, coaxing Maria outside.

But for all its beauty and sexual slipperiness, the film trips itself up with juvenile plot developments ripped from a romance paperback: predictable twists, a naff first-person voiceover, a cipher of a female protagonist. The film’s enticingly transgressive eroticism aside, Atef’s characters feel skimpily written, and the story all too familiar.