Der schöne Tag

A balcony door. It is open – the only source of light in a darkened room. The sound of birds. A young woman stands there, motionless. Is she watching the sleeping man?
The young woman, Deniz, is an actress. The film will accompany her for a whole day, with natural light and sound recorded on location. We see how she sorts laundry, auditions for a leading role and meets other people. She often takes the U-Bahn. Her movements on foot and by public transport lend the film structure and determine its rhythm. The feel for Berlin’s topography is impressive.
Der schöne Tag completes Thomas Arslan’s Berlin trilogy, following Kardeşler (1997) and Dealer (1999). It is about people of Turkish origin, all of them second-generation, although questions of identity are not even broached – they remain underneath the surface. In one scene, we see Deniz working as a voice artist, dubbing Éric Rohmer’s Conte d’été into German: like the character in the film whose lines she delivers, Deniz finds herself in state of uncertainty too.