A movie adaptation of the popular German YA novel THE CENTER OF THE WORLD by Andreas Steinhöfel, published in 1998, CENTER OF MY WORLD, directed by Austrian filmmaker Jakob M. Erwa, his third feature, is a Bildungsroman about a 17-year-older Phil (Hofmann), who returns from his three-week summer camp, during which his hometown has been torpedoed by a storm, and is bemused to notice that his twin sister Dianne (Stappenbeck) and their single mother Glass (Timoteo) are barely on speaking terms. What happened between the mother-daughter pair? It must go back to their past, and the movie takes a fitful rhythm to juggle between the two time-lines of present and past.
Meantime, Phil has his own adolescent problem to cope with, his nascent attraction to the new boy in the class Nicholas (Schümann) would put a strain on the friendship with his best friend Kat (Jung), especially when Nicholas and him become an item. Little does he know (but for viewers, telling signs are everywhere), a double betrayal is laid in store. For a sensitive, romantic soul like Phil, who is perpetually looking for a sense of security in his one-sided infatuation, the school of hard knocks is a requisite rite of passage, and gladly, he will grow out of it and at the same time, solving the multifarious little hitches to a wholesome happy ending, topped off with a hard-earned decision to let go of the big question mark of his existence, who is his biological father?
While Erwa’s narrative structure tends to be haphazard, more often than not, the dialogue is pure platitude (albeit benign to a fault), his visual flare also tallies with a televisual blandness, with a habit of dropping pop anthems in full impact, but the most peevish thing is that many potentially intriguing ingredients are unwisely downplayed, for example, Dianne’s preternatural power of communing with animals, inherited from their unnamed father, is only exhibited once, and by focusing on Phil, the missing piece of Dianne’s more dramatic and numinous arc feels short-changed.
Two outstanding performances emerge out of a patchy cast (to this reviewer’s eyes, Schümann’s jock allure is roundly undermined by his asymmetrical eyes, and both Stappenbeck and Jung feel miscast, the former doesn’t continue a uniquely ethereal air of her younger counterpart, played by Sarah Fuhrer, and the latter is saddled with a very unsympathetic role who doesn’t even have a chance to explain her improprieties), a fresh-faced Louis Hofmann beautifully interprets Phil’s sensitivity and queer delicacy, and a lissom Sabine Tomoteo is indeed, a wonder-maker through inhabiting a fey, temperamental woman who lives with her two kids in a derelict mansion, and never for a split second, actually, goes off the deep end against all the seemingly impressions, albeit her troubled history riddled with frequent break-ups, bad reputation and a mysterious miscarriage that is created by and furthermore creates internal fiction, she makes Glass a hell of a woman and a darn good mother too, that is something only a real trouper manages to pull off.
referential entries: Stephen Dunn’s CLOSET MONSTER (2015, 6.2/10), Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson’s HEARTSTONE (2016, 7.8/10).
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