Life is Rubbish

Reviewed - Atomised/Elementarteilchen: Oskar Roehler's film's supposed transgressive turns, challenging and corrosive in the original text, now induce skin-crawling embarrassment, writes Donald Clarke.

Some years back Michel Houellebecq's Atomised, taking on a status once enjoyed by Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude, became the novel with which every suave boulevardier had to be seen. Telling the story of two half-brothers who use contrasting strategies to cope with contemporary angst - one withdraws within himself, the other grumpily embraces decadence - the book was, in several figurative senses of the word, forehead-numbingly cool.

Oskar Roehler's film, by contrast, could not be more naff. The story's supposed transgressive turns, challenging and corrosive in the original text, now induce skin-crawling embarrassment. For whole swathes of the film, I felt as my 12-year-old self might have felt if forced to join my parents in watching a compilation of all the naughty bits from Dennis Potter plays.

The film's lowlight arrives when Bruno, the dissolute brother (played convincingly by Moritz Bleibtrau), takes himself to a nudist colony. Excited by the prospect of getting his hands on a large-breasted woman, Bruno volunteers to engage in a massage session. Imagine his surprise when he is directed towards a flabby, middle-aged man. Didn't Terry Scott, assigned to Bernard Breslaw's abdomen rather than Barbara Windsor's bottom, suffer similar disappointment in Carry on Camping? The scene is handled with equal subtlety in both films.

Atomised is everywhere sabotaged by its clumsily broad approach to character, design and story. Christian Ullmen turns the inhibited sibling, a microbiologist, still a virgin in middle-age, into the sort of textbook nerd Rick Moranis might create for a Disney film: glasses, parting, tweed jacket. The heroes' mother, whose unconventional approach to child-rearing has had unhappy long-term results, comes across like a hippie as drawn by Giles for an uncomprehending Sunday Express cartoon of the 1960s.

Domestic readers may, however, take particularly perverse pleasure from those scenes where Ullmen's character returns to study in Ireland. Roehler, a German director of some note, embraces the supposed location by including one shot of a remote cottage and employing several actors with marmalade-coloured hair to play his character's students. Darby O'Gill and the Little People had a better sense of place.