AMD 2- Mostly Martha

For this AMD activity I decided to watch a movie in German with English subtitles.  The movie I chose is  Mostly Martha, and it was recommended to me by a friend. I'm so glad that I took the recommendation because it was excellent! Mostly Martha cam out in 2001 and has since been made into an American "spin-off" titled No Reservations (which I have never seen but it did not get very good reviews).  Mostly Martha tells the story of a head chef (Martha) at a five star restaurant who is completely absorbed by her work. Cooking is all that she knows and all that she can relate to.  Martha is a notorious perfectionist and she approaches life as if it were a recipe that she could learn how to prefect and manipulate.  Unfortunately Martha is faced to come to terms with life's volatile and unpredictable nature when a car accident leaves her sister dead, and forces her nice Lina into her care.  Martha has no idea how to care for children and Lina's stubborn, unpredictable, and defiant behavior is unlike anything that Martha has ever had to deal with in the past.  On top of everything else, Martha's boss Frieda has just hired a new chef (Mario, from Italy) who will act as Martha's co-leader.  This is too much for Martha to bear, just as she has lost control over every aspect of her life she is forced to lessen her grip on the one thing whose predictability she could always depend on, cooking.  But of course, since Mostly Martha won a number of prestigious film awards, Martha and Mario end up falling in love, getting married, raising Lina as their daughter, and opening their own restaurant together (I swear it wasn't as cheesy as it sounds!).

This is only the second German film that I have ever seen (the first being Goodbye Lenin) so I don't have a lot to compare it to, but I did make some general observations.  I had a hard time picking up on linguistic aspects because the dialogue goes by super fast! With the exceptions of hearing really common words such as greetings, pronouns, negation words, and articles, I wasn't able to pick up on many words that we have learned in class.  However, there was the occasional use of family vocabulary such as Mutter, Tante, Vater, and Nichte.  I couldn't tell where in Germany the movie took place based on any sort of regional accent, but all of the outside scenes were cold and gray so perhaps the movie takes place in Northern Germany?  One thing I did notice was a level of formality between characters who have known each other for many years that was much greater that the level of formality that Americans in the same situation would maintain.  Finally, I was interested to see that unlike American Hollywood movies there were a lot of scenes were the viewer had time to observe and think about what was happening rather than have everything spoon fed.  This is also common of Italian films, except Italian films usually have very ambiguous endings.