Absolute Refusal

In this penultimate chapter, I want to organize my discussion around a few select sequences from each of Ulrich Köhler's three features to date: Bungalow, which focuses on Paul (Lennie Burmeister), a young man who out of the blue “decides” not to rejoin his military comrades and instead heads back home to the empty bungalow of his parents, located in the rolling hills by Marburg, where he subsequently bides his time without a clear sense of purpose; Montag kommen die Fenster, which centers on Nina (Isabelle Menke), who one day “decides” to abandon temporarily her husband and preschool daughter and to roam the woods surrounding Kassel, another provincial city; and Schlafkrankheit, which loosely revolves around Ebbo Velten (Pierre Bokma), a German medical doctor working in Cameroon who “decides” not to follow his wife back to Wetzlar, Germany, to live together with their teenage daughter (from whom they have been separated for a number of years).