film observes death from the inside. In this long moment of death, the I starts to wonder. Not about death, but about the inability to live. Not about futility, but about the fact that all these exhausting efforts have not brought the world and this I one inch closer to one another. In these sequences, too, as in the documentary episodes and the fragmentary reminiscences, Happiness Is A Warm Gun is as radically political as it is radically physical." "Imbach’s film is essentially an interpretation, a variation on a true story, as he himself says in the introduction, and thus a vehicle conveying a specific view. He is not afraid to show the ugly side of his subject, but it is something else that is important. His film is also a declaration of love: the two protagonists, especially Petra, are wonderful. In his typically detailed shots, which draw attention to things that are normally taken so much for granted that they go unnoticed, he marvels at Petra’s lips, the hollow at the bottom of her neck, her gentleness as she carefully and silently washes the exhausted Gert who stands naked before her." "Imbach has staged a version of the tragedy that shows the human-all-too-human extras behind the main actors on the political stage." "In 'Happiness Is a Warm Gun', the Swiss artist experiments with unreal leaps in time between past and future, between this world and the next, as we know it from the thrillers of David Lynch. A captivating, intense chamber play with unusual perspectives, which hopefully will find a distributor." "In a brilliant montage, Imbach extends the lives of Kelly and Bastian to the present day, virtually bombarding his audience with images and sounds... Cinema in the best sense of the word, which teaches you to see and hear." "Their unconditional and at the same time constantly reflected play creates a new, unique dimension of reality for the film - fragmentation and reconstruction reconciling, as it were. But it is also astonishing how Thomas Imbach, in this, his first actual directorial work with actors, understood how to bring his actors to "controlled identification", according to the theses he formulated: "Tell your actor who he is, but not what he should do", and "Every emotional movement of the actor is that of the character. There are no breaks in shooting" Bold words, indeed." References External links official website 2002