Beton airclothes: The great Oscar candidate "The Brutalist" tells of dreams and the hard reality in exile

At the age of 29, Adrien Brody received his first Oscar as the best main actor for "The Pianist". And so far the youngest actor has ever been in this category. As he climbed over the seats euphorically during the proclamation, it burned in. Now, over twenty years later, it could be so far: his new film„The Brutalist“, who starts in German cinemas on January 30, is nominated ten times for the Oscar. And so again Adrien Brody as a main actor. That is right: After "The Pianist" he plays his second, great role in life in this new architecture epic.

The Jewish architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) survived the Buchenwald concentration camp and travels to the USA in the late 1940s. He hopes for a fresh start here, his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) remains in Hungary. Tóth starts in the furniture store of his cousin in Pennsylvania and is commissioned to redesign the library of the rich industrialist Lee van Buren (Guy Pearce). Tóth, studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau and full of modernist ideas, she boldly plans avant-garde with wing door shelves. And the steel tube furniture unknown in the USA. Van Buren is horrified by the simple sculptural interior, but finally recognizes his artistic potential. He researches and finds out that Tóth was a celebrity in his home country and now has to work as a construction worker. Van Buren opens a new life for him, enables his wife's journey to the USA and commissioned him to build a community center that will blow up all dimensions: in size, costs and style. With unadorned, huge concrete walls and massive shapes, it breaks with everything until then. And like the "Tower Construction of Babel", more and more chaos and downfall triggers more and more. Because he is not as patronizing as Van Buren at first.

For a long time there was no film that is as much cinema film as "The Brutalist": It not only takes three and a half hours, which is almost a miracle in times of savings courses and, above all, more and more series with individual chapters. "The brutalist" lives primarily from the large screen and the dark cinema hall, which make his pictures and architectural settings all the more impressively.

Although he played in the 1950s, he chooses unusual perspectives and collaged perspective that reminds of the "new seeing" of the 1920s-the time when Tóth studied and developed his artistic, graphic style. As the photography of this time the film zooms up to the fabricity, it chooses the wide angle again and always looks extremely immediate and hypnotic. He develops a dynamic and a pace that sweeps and touch, which is also due to the game of Adrien Brodys.

"The brutalist" is an art film with a very special aesthetics. And settings that you want to frame yourself so tastefully and special are designed. However, his real art lies in the fact that this optics do not hide the plot. "The brutalist" is not a costume film, but a touching story about how to try to start a new life. And how you can't leave the terribly experienced traumatic.

Brody plays this commuting between hope and resignation impressively. Just as the National Socialists of his architecture brought an abrupt end and destroyed his buildings, the new work of Tóth's manifesto and all his skills should be reflected. He doesn't want to deviate from his plans. Much to irritation of his environment, which makes him increasingly isolated and manic. He resorts to heroin more often, and his wife also no longer gets close to him. Brody plays this psychological and physical decay in a wayy and pure out of itself. Sometimes everything can be seen in his eyes: brief happiness, gratitude, but also sadness. And passion and suffering are close together.

A new, also creative, looking for homeland, is about "the brutalist". And at the end, Tóth will not find that at Van Buren what you can feel from the start. Finally, the film makes a turn towards the actual salvation. Tóth's time comes and his path is symptomatic of the imponderable fate of many refugees of the past and also of the now. This makes the film, despite its retro aesthetics, extremely topical. You can feel and see a lot of humanity between cool concrete walls. A film as ambivalent as life.