She, young, good-looking, lesbian, stands next to her male colleagues at the urinal. He is not just any colleague, but her biggest competitor, courting her for the boss's favor, for the next career move. Obviously, he fooled them with wrong numbers on the balance sheet to make himself look better. She challenges him, but he does not let the confrontation in front of the loo disturb her.

The power relations clarify so fast: He can continue to pee, she has lost all sovereignty on entering his terrain. It does not matter if she's right. On the contrary, who succeeds in tricks is the better business consultant, it seems. In Marie Kreutzer's "The Ground Under the Feet", the scene at the urinal goes even further. For the director and screenwriter always looks for her film for the moments that shake the power structure.

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"The ground under your feet": I do not trust myself anymore

The world of business consultants with pressure to succeed, intrigues and big fall heights is made for it. Sebastian (Marc Benjamin) wants to enjoy his sudden superiority in the toilet. He turns to Lola (Valerie Pachner), the fly down and points to the alleged power of his penis. A gesture of the everyday Mackertums, which is reversed at Kreutzer immediately into the opposite. In no time at all, her heroine makes a photograph of his gender with his cell phone. He is bared.

The power of image evidence is not only in times of social media and video referees omnipresent. "The ground under your feet" is very aware of this. Especially when he does not show what is being talked about. The film by the Austrian director Kreutzer, who premiered at the Berlinale in February, is very contemporary in his own way. Primarily, he talks about the creeping uncertainty when there are no pictures. If we have to believe what the protagonists say and hear. And, of course, there are many reasons for not doing so, not just because we're dealing with fancy careerists and career losers.

From one success to the next?

The psychodrama begins with firm ground underfoot: First, Lola rages like a light figure of female assertiveness from one success to the next. But from the beginning it also has a price: not only the moments of tenderness with her boss and lover caught up in the corridor, on the toilet or in the hotel room, she conceals from her colleagues. Above all, nobody should know about their older, mentally disturbed sister, whose paranoid schizophrenia seems like the logical counterpart to the cosmos of business consulting.

"The ground under your feet"
Austria 2019
Written and directed by Marie Kreutzer
Performers: Valerie Pachner, Pia Hierzegger, Mavie Hörbiger, Michelle Barthel, Marc Benjamin, Axel Sichrovsky
Production: Novotny & Novotny Filmproduction GmbH
Rental: Salzgeber
Length: 108 minutes
FSK: from 12 years
Start: 16 May 2019

The relationship between Lola and Elise (Pia Hierzegger), who has just returned to the clinic following a suicide attempt, is marked by feelings of guilt, reproaches and a guilty conscience. Little by little, they doubt everything and Lola can not remember where her head is. Is she sick herself? What does she dream, what does she live, what does she hallucinate?

Kreutzer does not stage this successive insecurity as a contrast to the drab image of European economic routine. Rather, in a breathless race between interchangeable office complexes, hotels and airports, every paranoia seems pretty obvious.

Kreutzer's approach can best be described with cinematic imitation: as gray and sterile as the world she describes, she also shapes the appearance of the film experience. The mood she makes is hopeless, everyday and latently dangerous. However, this also marks a core affirmative relationship between the film and the world. What would otherwise be exposed as financial capitalist excesses and paternalistic grievances, seems to Kreutzer above all unavoidable.

In the video: The trailer for "The ground under your feet"

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Novotny movie

Thinking this along with their focus on the fragile psychology of the two female protagonists, it would be easy to fall back on the reactionary cliché: if something seems to be out of balance, it is probably because of female perception. But so ambitious, to think of a larger framework, "The ground under the feet" is probably not.