Jelinek film adaptation “Lovers”: smile, stream, wear skin on the market

Elfriede Jelinek's 1975 novel "Lovers" begins like this: "One day Brigitte decided that she just wanted to be a woman, completely a woman for a guy called Heinz." Brigitte, who is over 40 years old and can create 40 brassieres at a time, is determined to make it to the top. This was (or is?) only possible for a woman through a man or his family: "Brigitte crawls into Heinz's mother's ass," writes Jelinek, "there she finds nothing other than the same shit as in the shell that she is currently scrubbing." In addition to the worker character Brigitte, the book tells the story of Paula: “She is now old enough,” says Jelinek, “to be able to think about what she wants to be when she grows up: a housewife or a saleswoman.”

In her debut film, director Koxi has brought the female characters from Jelinek's story, described with resigned precision and consciously or unconsciously striving for independence but deeply entangled in the web of patriarchy, into the present. Brigitte (Johanna Wokalek) no longer works in the sewing factory, but instead stands at trade fairs in (at least) 7-centimeter heels in a mini dress in order to attract customers with a smile, because smiling is “a home,” as her boss tells the trade fair hostesses. When Brigitte loses a tooth while biting on an old piece of pizza, it's just fine - you can't see it straight away. But you can see that her face hurts after constantly grinning in the evenings.

The young Paula (Hannah Schiller), on the other hand, wants to influence no matter what, and constantly streams her life in a desolate town into the world - she films her mother's (Susanne Bredehöft) Bill Gates picture collection because she is “obsessed with Bill”; She films herself wearing a cat mask on a sex platform. She also sells her bottled bath water, her toenail clippings and her worn socks on the platform. Because what is becoming increasingly difficult for Brigitte, who is outgrowing hostess age, is child's play for 17-year-old Paula, in the truest sense of the word: both of them put their bodies on the market because both live in a system in which women's bodies, their possessions or their views, can be monetized.

“Lovers”. Director: Koxi. With Johanna Wokalek, Hannah Schiller and others. Germany/Luxembourg 2026, 98 min.

Although Brigitte is disgusted by Heinz (Ben Münchow) (“and his fat white electrician body, which is also called Heinz,” says Jelinek), she manages to get close to him - before she has to rent out the apartment on Airbnb due to lack of money and sleep on a sleeping mat in the locker room of her gym, she prefers to come to terms with the electrician body.

The women's lives are connected through Paula's streams, which separate and describe the protagonists in a simple yet impressive way due to the cinematographic display format on the one hand and the cinema format on the other, and which are devoured by Brigitte. But above all because Koxi's film, which appears over 50 years after Jelinek's book (and on the Austrian's 80th birthday), still reflects the grotesque reality: A lot has changed, a century after the first wave of the women's movement and half after the second. There are women like Brigitte's colleague who raps at her: "Use the patriarchy. Why do you have breasts, thighs, legs and a pussy?", there are men like Heinz, who suffers from not having "enough testosterone", and there are coaches like Susi (Stephanie Stremler), who can sell self-confidence with the most hackneyed of all sayings - which above all says something about their clients. But the bottom line is that the crap with women and men, capitalism and the sexual economy is the same as before. And like Jelinek, it's not just the women who are fucked by the system at Koxi.

Wokalek plays Brigitte like in a bizarre play, with Deadpan humor, but enough pathos to make the artificiality visible and let the absurdity completely take over the screen.

“Lovers” mixes the stories together in a similar associative (and dissociative) way as the novel, even if the cinematic narrative sometimes lacks Jelinek's bitter and powerful language, where laughter scratches your throat bloody while you get stuck. At least the anti-heroines go through a passable development in the end. And Brigitte, now a resident in Heinzen's villa, shows her equally gold-digging mother (Victoria Trauttmansdorff) around and shows what the skin was sold for: "The cupboard is new, the sofa is new, the television is new, and my new tooth."

In the end, what Paula streamed to the world at the beginning is true: “Men can be very helpful when it comes to dying in war or when you can’t open a jar.” But unfortunately that doesn't make it any better.